Scars on our Hearts
by tastewithouttalent
Summary: A set of SteinxSpirit songfic one-offs, not necessarily all in the same universe.
1. World So Cold

**World So Cold by 12 Stones**

Spirit isn't sure when he started becoming used to the violence. It came over him slowly, the ebbing away of his initial repulsion, until one day a spray of Kishin blood caught him across the face as he transformed back and his only reaction was to spit the taste out of his mouth. When he came home and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, his face was a gruesome mask, blood drying darker than his hair across his features, and it wasn't the sight itself that doubled him over with sudden nausea, but the calmness in the blue eyes looking back at him. For a moment, he looked more like his meister than he did like himself.

Stein finds him curled on the floor of the bathroom, face half-clean with tears and haphazard washing and hands pressed tight against his eyes. The meister sits next to him but doesn't reach out to initiate contact; he never does, not unless Spirit asks for it, and just at the moment the weapon doesn't want the comfort of touch anyway.

"I can't do this," he mumbles into his self-imposed darkness. "I can't *keep* doing this. It's tearing me apart, Stein, I wasn't meant for this."

"You were." The words are not comforting. There is nothing but absolute certainty in them, and reassurance is not what the weapon is looking for. He starts shaking his head as he speaks again.

"I *wasn't*. I can't keep doing this. Destruction isn't for me, Stein, just - it's nothing I've ever wanted."

"You're good at it." Spirit feels like he has been pinned down and carefully laid open by the honesty in those words. He knows they're true. He doesn't need the meister's explanation but it comes anyway. "You're *very* good. You will be the best weapon the academy has ever produced."

"But I don't *want* to be!" Spirit pulls his hands away and pushes himself upright so he can invade Stein's personal space, as if physical intimidation has ever had any effect at all on the younger boy. "*You* want to be, *you* want me to be, I know that, I do, and I *want* to be a good partner to you but I can't keep doing this and stay *me*."

There are volumes of subtext to his words: the memory of Stein's dark smile at the conclusion of a fight, the heat in the meister's eyes when he kills, the fact that the younger boy goes almost dormant between assignments, as if the only time he is really alive is when he's imposing destructive control over the lives of others. There's a second layer under that as well, the part that keeps Spirit here with his partner even when he knows perfectly well that "madness" is the gentlest of explanations for the younger's boy's mental state. It's part responsibility and part foolish affection and mostly an impossible attachment that Spirit couldn't break if he wanted to, but it all means that he can't leave, he can't stop his own emotional collapse, unless Stein gives him permission to go.

And he won't. Spirit sees it in his eyes, in the distance in Stein's face, in the already-made decision that finally pushes the meister to bridge the distance and rest his hand heavy on Spirit's shoulder, as if the rarity of physical contact will or could make up for the continuing, promised trauma of the future. The meister's skin is as cool as his eyes, as cool as his voice. "Stay."

It doesn't sound like a command, but it is as much an order as Spirit has ever heard. He is all out of fight - he never had much to begin with, just the last desperate struggle of a dying thing. He shuts his eyes again because he can't bear to see the cold beauty of his meister's face when he starts crying again, and his tears feel like fire on his cheeks.


	2. Save Yourself

**Save Yourself by My Darkest Days**

Stein knows what he is doing is wrong.

It is there in the back of his head every time he looks at his partner, whispering to him every time he lets his Madness take hold, purring self-loathing when he sees Spirit's face collapse into tears on his behalf. He is taking advantage of the weapon, letting the other boy care about him, care for him, when he *knows* in his heart that he is a broken thing that can never be put back together, that was never whole in the first place. That he cares about Spirit in return, that he aches for the comfort the older boy provides, that the weapon's voice can curb the wail of his insanity to a faroff whimper: these are incidental and accidental, nothing that Stein can control and nothing that should hold Spirit where he is. The meister knows entirely that something is *wrong* with his perception of the world, that other people do not casually disregard the feelings of those around them, that there are such things as morals and that others are restrained by them. Spirit is a better example of this than anyone else; Stein has never met anyone else so burdened by *caring*, for strangers, for friends, for his family. Above all, Spirit is dragged down by the infinite difficulty of caring for Stein himself.

If he were a better person, Stein would tell him to leave. He would push the other boy away, tell him to find a better partner, maybe go over his head and have him officially reassigned. He has always been distant from those around him; all it would take would be the act of relegating Spirit into the category of "other" and it would be done. But he does not know if he can remove the weapon from the inner sanctum of his self now that the older boy is there, and more terrifyingly he does not know if he would be able to make himself pull away if he knew it were possible. If he looks too closely he may find that he has always been *able* to, that it is a matter of unwillingness, and if he finds that fact Stein is horribly afraid that the unfamiliar sting of guilt and love will control his body as thoroughly as his Madness ever has and do the separation for him, and that he cannot bear.

Not looking doesn't stop him from knowing, though. When the Madness comes on him, jerking him awake with the echoes of his skull, he knows. He knows when he drags himself down the hallway to Spirit's room, knows when he pounds on the door until the weapon appears bleary with sleep and panicked with concern. When Spirit pulls him to lie against the other boy in the weapon's bed, when Spirit wraps his arms around Stein's too-thin shoulders, when his fingers are stroking the back of the meister's neck and tracing warm patterns on his scalp, Stein knows. When the screaming in his head has faded and he can hear the tears in Spirit's wordless murmurs and can feel the damp of concern against the weapon's cheeks, he knows.

The Madness goes quiet at times like that. Stein shuts eyes gone inexplicably heavy with moisture and winds his own arms around his partner, and his fingers clench into fists in the back of Spirit's shirt while he tries to tell the weapon to leave, that this is only a treatment and not a cure, that he will never be fixed and this will only get worse and there is nothing at all for the other boy but the constant losing struggle to make Stein into a functional human. He tries to tell Spirit that the weapon doesn't understand, can't ever understand, and that Stein will just keep taking from him, bleeding off his endless affection, shadowing the perfection that is his partner. But the words always stick in his throat, choking him on his inability to protect his weapon from himself, and the only thing he can do is dig his fingernails into the nerves of his palms while his tears condense on Spirit's ever-forgiving skin.


	3. Lie to Me

**Lie to Me by 12 Stones**

Stein is on the couch when Spirit comes home. He isn't doing anything, just lying on the cushions, his head propped on one end, staring at the rough ceiling of the room. He is giving a good imitation of comfortable relaxation except that he doesn't move at all when the door opens, doesn't react to the sound or the light in any way.

Spirit hates coming into the house now. The air is full of knowledge and suspicions, things they both know and neither has yet had the courage or the certainty to say. Spirit knows if he thinks about things for very long, he will have to speak up. He will demand to know what's going on, what has been drawing Stein tighter and tighter with each passing day, what it is that weighs down between them and crushes the easy familiarity of their first few years together. He can't think about it. If he does he might find the answers on his own, and right now he doesn't want to know.

"Hi Stein." He makes an attempt at casualness that is stunningly ineffective.

"Spirit." The meister shuts his eyes, doesn't look at him. "Do you need something?"

The words are cool but less of a rejection than they would be from someone else. Spirit is used to this; this is just a function of the meister's self and less a product of the recent strain between them, a strange comforting sense of the bizarre normalcy they have developed.

He opens his mouth to say no, but the refusal sticks in his throat, and then his feet are carrying him towards the couch and he sitting next to the younger boy and letting his head drop to rest against Stein's thigh. The meister half-sits up, startled into a reaction by the sudden unexplained contact, but Spirit can't muster enough guilt to apologize for the unasked intimacy. Stein is warm and real and just at the moment the contact is sending thrills of syrupy pleasure through Spirit's body and nothing could persuade him to move.

After what feels like a very long time, Stein leans back against the couch. Spirit has his eyes shut, but he can feel the meister's gaze cling to him. It almost makes him smile. When Stein's fingers land feather-light against his hair he *does* smile, opens his eyes so he can watch Stein's face. There is nothing more beautiful or more upsetting than Stein's expression when he is touching Spirit, and the pained appreciation of the same suits Spirit's mood at the moment. From this angle the light misses the meister's glasses and Spirit can see the younger boy's pupils dilate out into the surrounding green, the corners of his eyes relax into softness, the shape of his mouth firm into a protective line that shouts of repressed emotion better than tears would. His hand is barely touching Spirit's hair, brushing just against the red so the shift in individual strands feels like it could be resulting from an affectionate breeze rather than a person. Spirit is impressed by the implied control in Stein's movements; the meister truly does have the steady hands of a surgeon, even when Spirit *knows* adrenaline is pulsing through his veins with every heartbeat.

Stein's gaze comes circling around the top of Spirit's head, brushes along his jawline, lingers at his throat above his collar, then comes up to meet the older boy's stare. Stein looks languid, resigned, pleased and pained in equal parts, and Spirit doesn't want to break the moment but there's nothing he needs more in the world right now than the comfort of Stein's reassurance.

"Stein." He wants to ask for the words but his throat closes around them and suddenly it is all he can do to keep from crying. Stein blinks at him. His expression doesn't change except that his mouth twists, like he's fighting off a smile or a sob or both, and then he is in control of his lips and speaking.

"It'll be alright." If Spirit listened to the words alone he would believe them. If Spirit didn't know implicitly that Stein's monotone makes it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication he would believe him. If Spirit wasn't looking at Stein's eyes, if Spirit didn't *know* that nothing will ever again be alright for them, if Spirit couldn't taste the farewell hanging in the air between them, he would believe them.

So he shuts his eyes, and he turns away from his intuition, and he disregards the creeping knowledge of the end, and he lets the lies soothe him while they still can.


	4. Breathe Into Me

**Breathe Into Me by RED**

There is no such thing as pain for Stein anymore.

He knows there must have been such a thing as physical sensation once. There was a time when blood came with a rush of hurt, a blaze of agony that tore through his focus like fire. There is nothing like that anymore. He has been sitting on the floor for hours, dragging the blade in his hands across his skin in an attempt to recapture the pain he *knows* once was there, in an attempt to prove to himself that he is still alive, that he can still feel anything at all. There is red all around him now, staining the white of his sleeves and dripping slowly into the collecting pool on the ground, but there is no response in his mind but the echoing disbelief that has been there since his partner left.

Spirit is gone. Stein knows there was a reason and there was a fight and there was logic there, but 'logic' has become as meaningless as 'pain.' There is nothing for him at all now, no pain, no logic, no thought because thought implies a grasp on survival, a belief in continued existence, and distantly Stein is sure this reaction is just that, a self-defense mechanism to protect himself from some worse realization, but he can barely hold onto that idea long enough to process it before it slides through his blood-slick grasp along with everything else.

He is lost without Spirit. There is no meister without a weapon, there is no Stein without Spirit, there is nothing to hurt and nothing to save and nothing to go on living. The older boy is aptly named; Stein didn't realize that all of his self would go with the weapon, that all his desires and hopes for the future would evaporate with the separation. The only thing left to him is his curiosity, too bone-deep to entirely vanish, and even it is strangely dulled, vague and unfocused and currently occupied with tracing patterns the color of Spirit's hair across his own unresponsive skin.

His vision is starting to go, and even that doesn't prompt any sort of self-preservation response. Stein knows with clinical detachment that he is cutting too much; none of the wounds are deep enough to bleed for more than a minute or two, but minutes add up, and he has no concept of how long he has been at this, and the spread of color around him says that his timeline is running out. The flicker of a metaphor bursts briefly in his head, the color leeching out of his too-pale skin and Spirit exiting his life overlapping into perfect alignment, but then the thought is gone and he can't recall what made that connection in the first place. The world spins dizzily around him as his sight goes dark, as gravity decides to play games with his equilibrium so he feels like he's toppling sideways instead of down.

Consciousness comes back in short bursts, only long enough for Stein to realize he's on the ground, that his glasses are gone, that his hands are too heavy to continue the monotonous work of cutting himself to pieces before it slips away again. When he shuts his eyes on the world, Spirit's face comes into razor-sharp clarity in the darkness. That does what the cutting couldn't and flashes Stein's body into responsiveness again, but it brings with it the knowledge of what he has lost that almost undoes the gain of the hallucination.

There are voices, very far off, echoing down the corridors of his wandering mind. His name is in there but none of the voices are important enough to surface for. He isn't sure that is even his name anymore anyway; it refers to a person and a consciousness that he no longer owns, that he is not sure even exists anymore. The hands against his skin, the arms lifting his body, are just as far-off. If he laid any claim to the form he inhabits anymore, he would fight his saviors for the right to oblivion. Since he doesn't, he lets them take him and lets the ringing emptiness in his head fill with the faint pleasure of memories, like the lost echo of the life they once granted him.


	5. Built for Sin

**Built for Sin by Framing Hanley**

Spirit has seen the end coming for months. He is not sure how long ago he traded innocence for self-deceit, at what point he decided heaven was worth trading for the brief necessity of Stein, but it was too distant or too easy for him to recall now. He just knows that the end is upon them, that Stein is careening inevitably towards a destruction that the weapon cannot save him from and cannot join him in. The meister isn't sleeping again, has been staying up through long caffeine-fueled nights, and Spirit can see the madness in him, barely controlled at the best of times, lurking behind Stein's eyes every time he looks at the older boy. It is there when Spirit touches him, it bleeds out of the meister when Spirit kisses him, it underlines every tremble and every sigh and Spirit knows that this is a battle he is doomed to lose.

Stein doesn't know. Spirit isn't sure if this is deliberate avoidance or just pure obliviousness brought on by his tenuous grip on reality, but when Stein goes quiet it is to hear the purr of static in his head and not from the press of unforgettable understanding weighing Spirit down. Spirit doesn't know how someone so broken can be so beautiful. It is not that Stein is ever fully sane, not that Spirit heals him into brief periods of rationality; even when Stein's eyes are closed against the pleasure of Spirit's mouth and the meister's breath comes stutteringly fast with ecstasy, Spirit can taste insanity like a bitter aftertaste to the salty sweetness of Stein's skin. He doesn't need the meister's unsteady gaze or unthought words to tell him of the end. He can feel it in Stein's heartbeat, echoing in the back of every kiss, lingering along the edges of all their interactions.

The only time he can ever forget, and then only for a moment, is when they fight. The irony of that isn't lost on him, that during ordinary interactions Stein's instability is everywhere but in the midst of a life-or-death situation it fades into the background, but that makes a mad sense like everything else. With a mundane backdrop Stein looks like a feral thing attempting to pass itself off as domesticated; facing down a horrifying demon he looks like what he is, a too-young boy composed of madness and violence and lust, and against that the sharp bite in the corner of his laughter is entirely appropriate. He is razor-edged and bloody with instinct then, and Spirit is sure that he has never seen anything more beautifully cruel.

He cannot stay. That same edge that makes Stein so dangerous is impossible to control or to avoid and staying would be suicide for a normal person like Spirit. Spirit tells himself this, his internal monologue gaining volume every day, but he cannot yet bear to walk away, to leave Stein to scream for help in the emptiness of a lonely house. He is all the conscience that the meister has; all the affection and empathy Stein ever receives comes from Spirit. Self-preservation isn't yet enough to overcome the pull of that barely-caged violence and the taste of that half-mad smile.


	6. This Dark Day

**This Dark Day by 12 Stones**

Stein never believed that he would leave. Spirit has been telling him for months, spitting it around mouthfuls of blood or sighing it against the lingering warmth of Stein's skin, but the meister hasn't been listening or hasn't believed, and now he is staring at Spirit with eyes wide with rare shock.

"I tried to tell you," Spirit starts to defend himself. He knows he shouldn't, that he should walk out the door and leave while he can and while he has the determination to do so, but his feet stall at the expression on the meister's face and he *must* give some sort of explanation as an offering to that.

"You won't." Stein talks over him, cuts off his words, with all the certainty the younger boy's voice has ever had in spite of the terror rising in his eyes. "You *want* me. You *need* me. You're not strong enough to leave this, to leave us. Senpai."

The shiver of fear that courses down Spirit's spine disputes the latter but the flicker of response in his blood affirms the first. Spirit has to look away from the green behind Stein's glasses in order to find the breath to respond. When he watches Stein's face he loses himself, drowns under the force of the other boy's will and soul and strength, and he will agree to anything after that.

"I will. I am." Spirit has to swallow to bring saliva into his mouth, to push back the fear and the tears and the want that are surfacing in his blood, but he has never been as determined as he is right now. "I am leaving, Stein. This isn't what's right for me. It isn't what's right for *us*. I'm learning to hate you and I don't want to. If I stay we'll tear each other apart and I can't bear that." He is gaining momentum with his words, starts to move forward with the last of them. "I'm saving you as much as I'm saving myself."

"Senpai, *don't*." Spirit is past the younger boy now but he doesn't have to see the meister's face to read the terror, not when panic is writ large in the syllables leaving his mouth. "Don't go. Don't you *dare*."

Spirit reaches for the door. For a moment his shoulders go tight with the expectation of impact, either Stein himself or Stein's wavelength, but when his fingers touch the handle and nothing comes the expectation vanishes. He can *feel* Stein behind him, taut with anticipation on the couch, but the meister doesn't move.

When Spirit opens the door and steps outside, he thinks he hears "Senpai" once more, brokenly, but he's not sure and he doesn't look back. He can't.

He walks until he's out of sight of the laboratory, well off the grounds and lost in the night-dark alleys of Death City proper, before he lets himself crumple to the ground against a wall. He knows he must look awful but he can't muster the ability to care about anyone but the meister alone behind him at the moment. It's all he can do to keep breathing with the weight of guilt at abandoning Stein crushing down on his chest.

His mind is bombarding him with images, memories, remembered sensations: Stein laughing, the feel of cold metal and warm hands on his skin, the burn of pain and the flush of pleasure. He started crying at some point but didn't notice when and now his face is wet with tears and his throat is so clogged with them he can barely breathe. His vision is blurring with moisture and his hands are starting to shake like he's coming off an addiction, which he supposes is accurate in a way.

Spirit shuts his eyes, clenches his trembling hands into fists, wills himself into stillness. Over the buzz of painful memories he starts to whisper to himself, tries to listen to the word on his lips instead of the voices in his head. "It will pass. This will get better. It will not always be this way. This will pass. You will make it through this. It will get better." The words stick in his throat and he has to choke them out around a throat swelling closed with tears, but he continues anyway, trying to convince himself to stay, to wait, that leaving is the only way for him to someday come back for good.

It is not much comfort today.


	7. Closer

**Closer by Nine Inch Nails**

Stein *wants* Spirit Albarn.

The word is not enough on its own but it is the best thing he has. When his blood flares hot under his skin, when he can't think of anything but Spirit's mouth and Spirit's body and Spirit's breathing, it is the best he can force past lips gone numb with desire. Language isn't enough to express himself; far better to pin Spirit to a wall, to dig his fingers into Spirit's hair or hard into his skin, to scrape along Spirit's mouth or neck with his teeth and let his body do the talking for him. Spirit never resists. The weapon goes pliant under these attacks, dropping his weight back against the wall, tipping his head sideways to grant Stein better access to his skin, sighing his condensing breath along Stein's cheek or shoulder as the meister tries to explain himself with hands and tongue rather than with voice and words.

Stein can escape himself at those times. When he presses his fingertips into the soft give of Spirit's waist, he can ignore the itch to destroy in his hands. When he drags his teeth along the taut skin over Spirit's collarbone, he can forget the violence lurking under his smile. When he grinds his hips against Spirit's thigh, he can turn off the unique insanity of his brain for the more ordinary pulse of desperate desire.

And then there's Spirit. Responsive, willing, gasping against Stein's skin and trailing his hands across Stein's back and flushing warm and alive at Stein's touch until Stein feels like Spirit is the only one of the two of them that is breathing, that he is just an extension of the weapon, borrowing the other boy's life and vitality to worship him.

Stein is not religious. Stein has never found the idea of god comforting, has never thought the idea of an omnipotent Father was particularly worth his time. Spirit, flawed and human and perfect, is a god that Stein can worship. When Spirit whimpers into the curve of Stein's neck it sounds like a prayer. When Spirit's eyes dilate with pleasure and he gasps a stuttering breath of climax, it feels like scripture. When Spirit is languid and smiling after, when Spirit is sprawled across their bed, when Spirit's lips curve into Stein's skin, it is absolution. In those moments Stein can close his eyes and let the still comfort of satisfaction pool in his bones, let the comfort of perfection stretch itself down his veins and into his bloodstream.

Spirit makes Stein over again, turns him whole and complete and sane while they are together. Stein can pour his madness, his loneliness, his hurt into the weapon and Spirit heals him into something better than he is alone.


	8. Drumming Song

**Drumming Song by Florence and the Machine**

The first time Stein sees Spirit Albarn, his mind goes quiet. It is so stunning and so unexpected that his breathing stutters in reaction. He does not know what to do without the constant humming companionship of his mental static, the sound of voices at too much of a distance to distinguish words. It is always there: when he talks, when he works, when he sleeps, the backdrop to his life that lets him know he's alive.

The weapon isn't even looking at him when it happens. Stein is against the wall, taking in the other students surrounding him, checking their pins: meister, weapon, weapon, meister, weapon, meister. Then his eyes come up and land on a boy skinny with new height, brilliantly red hair skimming his shoulders, face alight with an easy smile, and the sound cuts off as if it never existed. There is a ringing silence in Stein's ears, and then he gasps his forgotten inhale and the vacuum fills with the thunder of his heartbeat.

He is used to noise, used to tuning out the white whisper of his life and carrying on around it as if it weren't there, but this is *new* and *inexplicable* and Stein doesn't like things he doesn't understand, but he can't regain control over his speeding heart or his rushing blood and he can't *leave*, not now, so he lets his feet carry his forward to the other boy. He is a weapon. Stein knows this before he sees the pinned tag on the breast of his dark coat, knows it inherently without ever needing to blink into Soul Perception and read the other boy's wavelength. He *knows*.

The taller boy turns as he approaches, and his eyes are worse even than his hair, perfectly blue and shining with friendly pleasure, and Stein has no words at all to offer to those eyes and that hair and that *smile*, so he comes to a stop and just stares. It would be awkward if the other boy wasn't already smiling and glancing at Stein's own tag and extending his hand.

"Hi there. I'm Spirit Albarn. What's your name?"

*Spirit.* The name drops into the pounding in Stein's mind, the rhythm of the syllables sliding between two too-fast heartbeats like it was meant to be there, like the pattern of Stein's heart was built around this boy's name and just waiting for the introduction to make the connection. Stein takes the offered hand.

"Stein."

That smile is devastating. Stein wonders in the distant memory of silence in his mind if Spirit has any idea. "You're a meister! I'm a weapon. A scythe, actually, very traditional I guess." When the weapon laughs Stein's jumbled mind starts to suspect that there may be a hint of nervousness underneath the exuberant friendliness. "I guess we're supposed to find our own partners, which is a little frightening. What if we chose wrong? And how are we supposed to know who we're compatible with? Can we just pair any which way?"

That is definite nervousness, Stein is sure of it now. His own thoughts are crashing apart upon each rushing beat of his heart, the sound beating into his head with more force than any of the other boy's half-thought chatter. He is drowning in the sound raging in his ears, sucking in air like it will somehow quiet the din in his skull, but it doesn't matter. He is more sure of this stranger than he has ever been of anything in his life. They will be partners, they have to be partners, no one has ever been more his partner than this gangly boy with too-blue eyes and too-red hair in front of him.

He is right, of course. Stein is never wrong when he is really *sure* of something.


	9. Sweet Nothing

**Sweet Nothing by Calvin Harris feat. Florence Welch**

The first time Stein calls Spirit "senpai" is the moment Spirit realizes he is in love with the meister. It is appended to a random comment; when he thinks back on it Spirit can't recall the context or the topic at all. His memory is dominated by the sound of those two syllables on Stein's lips. He stopped what he was doing, frozen in place by the meaning he is sure he misheard, and turned to see the younger boy's face, but Stein looked entirely calm and as if he had said nothing out of the ordinary. It is the surge of disappointment that makes Spirit realize he was hoping for more.

Stein never went back to calling Spirit by his given name. The weapon still doesn't know why the meister switched, what changed in the younger boy's head to cause the change. He does know that the honorific sends a chill of pleasure down his spine every time he hears it and that reading more into it than there is his favorite way to explain the change.

Stein gives him so little to work with. The meister is uniformly cool, distant, mildly amused in a way that does not allow for sharing in the joke. He speaks in a monotone and hides behind the reflection of his glasses; in the years they have been partners Spirit has spent several of them unsure if Stein likes or appreciates or just tolerates him. Every half-compliment and every tendril of warmth in the meister's voice is enough for Spirit to run on for weeks, but late at night the insecurity of darkness comes up and points out that he is clinging to invention, that taken as a whole there is nothing there at all by any reasonable standards. Spirit is good at deluding himself - that has always been one of his questionable strengths - but even he can only go so far when he is breathless with desire and Stein is entirely unresponsive.

When he realizes it has been almost a year, that he has been holding himself up by imagination and anticipation for long months since anything changed, he knows it is time to be responsible. He is almost eighteen and nearly a death scythe - clinging to hope and a word for all this time is absurd, and if he doesn't do something about this now he never will and he will be trapped in the exciting pointlessness of this relationship forever.

Even with the focus of determination, the fluttering nausea in his stomach is hoping that Stein won't be around when he goes looking for the meister so he can buy some time to collect himself and possibly change his mind about his decision. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, Stein is easy to locate, slouched forward over the desk in the living room and perusing the book laid open in front of him.

Spirit freezes in the doorway. There is a moment of utter panic that swallows his decision to move forward. If he stops here, he can still give up on this, can keep things just as they are and keep Stein just as he is. They will stay partners and they will be no risk and everything will continue as it has.

When he moves forward, his skin goes chill with clammy sweat as his fear finally makes itself known externally. He is worried he is going to be sick from the swooping of his stomach, but he is committed now, and the surge of regret at his decision is too little and too late to sway him.

"Stein." His voice is shaking audibly to his ears, but Stein doesn't react to it beyond turning away from the desk to face him.

"Senpai." Those syllables *still* send a fizz through Spirit, even after weeks and months of repetition, but now Stein is looking at him expectantly and he has to go on.

He had planned to approach the subject with some minimal amount of graceful misdirection, but pinned between his own fright and Stein's steady gaze Spirit is blurting out the real question before he has properly decided to do so. "Do you like me?"

That was not the right thing to ask, too childish and too ridiculous, and Stein is raising an eyebrow and fighting back a smile when he answers, "Of course I do."

Spirit is flushing hot - he can feel his face glowing with the rush of blood under his skin - but it can't possibly get worse than he has already made it so he pushes forward.

"That's not really what I mean," he starts.

"What *do* you mean?" Stein's voice is as monotone as ever but he has stopped fighting the smirk now and that gives his words the teasing edge they lack in tone.

Spirit is sure he can't possibly blush any harder but now he's laughing too, self-conscious and awkward against Stein's self-possession. He has always echoed Stein's reactions with interest, he can't help it, even when they are at his expense. "Look. Stein. We've been partners for four years now and I - I'm such a mess and such an idiot and I think you might just be putting up with me and I'm worried that you -" He can't put words to the end of his fears even though he knows he should, so instead he lets them trail off and looks away, rubbing his hand along the back of his neck.

"Senpai." That brings his gaze back even when he doesn't mean to look. Stein's expression is clear now, no trace of the teasing that was there a moment ago. His eyes are serious and focused and he is leaning forward towards Spirit the way he was leaning over his book when the weapon entered. "I like you. I care about you. Do you really think I don't?"

Spirit thought that was it when he came in, that he was afraid that Stein just disliked his presence. But he has all the reassurance he could have wanted now and this isn't enough. In his own head words lose their meaning; it is easy to strip all the extra possibilities out of a phrase or a name or a sentence until it just becomes sounds again. His cold resignation is gone and now there is desperation in its place, hot panic in his throat and shaking through his hands and tangling the words in his mouth, and words are not the way to do this. Words are what got him here in the first place and he can't keep on with just those.

Spirit knows he can leave. This *is* what he came for. This is the extent of his plan. He could leave now and curl around this new affirmation for the few days he would have before it loses its gloss and the meaning seeps out of it.

He steps in and kisses Stein.

The meister doesn't react at all. There isn't time for him to react. There is barely time for Spirit to realize what he is going to do before he is doing it and his lips are pressed against Stein's. There is a long moment of shocked clarity before his reaction hits, a moment when Spirit feels the edge of Stein's glasses pressed into his cheekbone and the texture of Stein's mouth under his lips and the utter stillness of the meister's body. It's not until Spirit is pulling back that his blood catches up with his brain and floods him with adrenaline and excitement and panic, so he starts hyperventilating only once the kiss is over.

Stein is staring at him with no expression at all, the very blankness in his eyes and slackness in his face screaming his total shock. It seems suddenly very inexplicably funny; Spirit chokes on a laugh before he is able to swallow his amusement back.

"You don't owe me anything, Stein." He manages to get out, and then he turns and is leaving at almost a run, cold horror at what he has done and thrilling delight at the gain of *something* fighting for dominance in his blood.


	10. Howl

**Howl by Florence and the Machine**

Stein shouldn't have been surprised that Spirit ended up at a church.

The weapon styles himself with all the trappings of religion, and Stein has not been able to determine yet if this is an affectation or actual spirituality or both. He himself has never felt the draw of belief in a higher power; God has always seemed distant and unlikely to him, certainly not worth following even in the event of his existence. Faith in something or someone else never made any sense to him until he met Spirit. Stein would follow Spirit anywhere.

As he is tonight. The weapon left their shared apartment and Stein waited only the barest handful of seconds before throwing himself into the darkest clothes he owns (black jeans and a grey T-shirt) instead of the usual light-catching white of his lab coat and leaving after the other boy. He didn't even realize he had left shoes and socks at home until his feet hit the rough paving stones of the main street, and beyond brief irritation at the inconvenience he disregarded the pain in favor of trailing his partner.

When Stein realizes where Spirit is going, he has to laugh, and when the older boy steps into the churchyard proper Stein dispenses with the trappings of secrecy. Even so it takes Spirit longer than it should to realize he has company. Stein's pale hair catches the moonlight but the unusual darkness of his clothes grants him some camouflage, and his bare feet are entirely silent against the well-kept grass of the yard. As he's coming up behind Spirit, Stein feels briefly as if he is stalking prey, like his approach will culminate in the splash of warm blood across his skin and the rush of victory over another. Then Spirit turns and sees him and the illusion retreats, not entirely but back from the edge of almost-reality.

"Stein." The weapon is surprised but not as much as the meister expected. His eyes flick up and down Stein's body, dark eyebrows raise against pale skin. "What did you do with your shoes?"

Stein shakes his head. He is close now, almost within arm's length. "I didn't need them."

"Yes you do, you're bleeding -"

"Spirit." Now he's close enough. He reaches out to grab the front of Spirit's shirt before the weapon can pull away. The older boy looks up at him, his eyes catch the light, but he doesn't move back out of Stein's personal space. "I don't need them." He leans in over the minimal distance between them. Spirit tips his head up in anticipation of a kiss, but Stein slips sideways to ghost his lips against the edge of the other boy's cheekbone instead. Spirit huffs a sigh of surprise and pleasure and Stein is pulling at the buttons of his shirt, working his way down the front so it only takes a few seconds of hot breath against Spirit's jaw and hairline and cheek before his shirt is open and Stein can push him stumbling backward until his shoulders hit a tree and the weapon comes to a halt.

Spirit is staring at him with wide eyes; in the shadow the tree casts Stein can't make out the color but the expression in them is crystal clear, fright and confusion and, yes, pleasure, an intrigued interest that sends Stein's blood pounding fast through his veins as if demanding freedom. He advances on Spirit, stepping well within the other boy's space so the weapon is trapped between Stein's body and the tree at his back, and then he rests his forehead against the rough bark and lets his hands slide against the night-chill skin so newly exposed. Spirit shivers, gasping warm against Stein's shoulder, and the sound speaks of excitement and arousal far more than of the fear that was there a moment ago. When Stein tightens his fingers to press hard against the weapon's ribcage Spirit sucks in a breath and tips his head back and that's it for the fright entirely, for the fright and for Stein's fragile self-control. He is on his knees, pressing Spirit hard against the tree, and his mouth and tongue and teeth are against the weapon's chest, pressing hard so he can feel the older boy's heartbeat speed against the sensitive skin of his lips and so the sharp edge of his teeth scrape a narrow line against the canvas of Spirit's flesh. Spirit's hands are in his hair, stroking through the fine strands, gentle even now. It takes Stein's breath and flares his frustration at once as his body demands this tender affection and the satisfying pain of reciprocated aggression simultaneously.

He is on his feet again, pressing himself against the sharp edge of Spirit's hip, and Spirit is clutching at his shoulders and panting against his shoulder and Stein's not even *doing* anything, just threading his leg between Spirit's so he can push the other boy back against the trunk at his back. His fingernails are bitten short with the carelessness of distraction but if he angles his fingers like *this* he can get purchase on Spirit's shoulder or stomach or hip, and when he drags like *that* Spirit will arch into his leg and curl away from his hand at the same time with a hiss that is a little pain and a lot pleasure. Stein can't keep his head straight when Spirit's mouth is on his, so he tips his head against the tree just to the side of Spirit's so he can breathe in the smell of Spirit's red hair and feel the warmth from the weapon's panting breath condense against his skin. When Spirit maneuvers a hand down the front of Stein's jeans the other boy's touch is almost enough in and of itself, and when Stein pulls his fingernails in a jagged path down Spirit's glowing skin to the top of his own pants the weapon's stuttered breathing promises that neither of them will last very long.

Stein doesn't know what it is about his weapon that draws him in so thoroughly. Usually his interests are intense but brief; the obsession lasts as long as it takes to pull whatever the object is apart and gain entire understanding. But the closer he gets to Spirit the worse his obsession becomes. The more time he spend trying to memorize every color in the weapon's eyes or taste every corner of the other boy's skin, the less he understands Spirit's odd tenderness, his gasping response to the pain Stein's teeth and fingers inflict, the softness in his eyes when he looks at the meister. Stein is beginning to suspect there is no going back from this, there is no recovery to be had from this particular fever, and at times like this, with Spirit shuddering against him and his own satisfaction curling up to wash over him, he can't care at all.


	11. Nemo

**Nemo by Nightwish**

Stein has always known he is lost. There is some key component to the world, to life, to interactions that everyone around him has always understood and he can't so much as see. He has spent his whole life collecting data, trying to develop some sort of pattern to the world that he can follow, but everything changes so quickly around him and within his own head that he is always wandering through darkness.

The only time anything has ever made sense is when he is with Spirit. He can understand Spirit, he can follow Spirit, he can set his morals and his behavior by Spirit. The weapon offers a consistency that Stein has never had in and of himself, a way to orient his world so it makes sense or at least so it remains steady from day to day and hour to hour.

When Spirit left him, the loss of that fixed point was worse by far than anything else. Stein could feel the madness in him seething up to swallow all that he had worked for, reaching for his mind and his body while he could do nothing but let it approach. If he had been able to let go of the memories of the weapon, he could have thrown himself back into the shadows, let the darkness swallow him whole and let go of sanity with a sigh of relief. But the bright point of those recollections in the shadows of his mind kept him desperate for rationality, held him to the course that he could no longer see and could no longer follow but knew now was there. Having once seen it, once followed it, to turn his back on the light was to turn his back on Spirit, and no amount of hurt feelings or agonizing loss could pull that away. Stein is fairly confident that loyalty to his partner is graven into his soul at this point, that someone who looked closely would find 'senpai' scrawled across the wavelength itself, because Stein has never made any sense without Spirit.

So he struggles. He fights off the madness by day and drops into dreams by night, lets the darkness of the evening cover his eyes so the hallucinated brightness of reason can illuminate his mind. The days are harder, long expanses of time between those self-wrought illusions, just a period for Stein to wage war on his internal chaos before he can remind himself why he is still fighting. He found his heart in Spirit and he can't let it go peacefully, so he keeps pushing back against the aimless madness in his soul and waits for the day that Spirit will come back, that Spirit will brush his fingers across his hair and whisper his name the way he does in Stein's dreams.

Stein will wait forever, if he has to. He cannot give up the fight with himself and he cannot give up on Spirit, so he will wait as long as it takes for Spirit to come back home.


	12. Bring Me to Life

**Bring Me to Life by Evanescence**

It takes Stein a long time to realize Spirit is in the room with him. He has been curled on the floor, wrapped around the dirt and the blood that are smeared across his hands like that will hide them or they will protect him or something else that he hasn't fully thought out in his own mind. The buzzing in his head is too loud to hear anything else over it; it isn't until Spirit reaches out and touches his hair that the meister realizes anyone else is there at all, and only after that that the weapon is (has been?) speaking. It takes a concentrated force of effort to focus on Spirit's voice over the sound of his internal thoughts and still more to actually match the words with the meanings that he knows they have, but there is a reason Spirit is important even though Stein can't remember what that is right now.

Understanding comes in the middle of Spirit's sentence. "- different than what we've been doing. I mean this just isn't feasible long-term, you know?" The words are serious but the voice is teasing. Stein is having trouble matching the discrepancy and Spirit's touch in his hair is not helping matters at all; his concentration keeps slipping sideways into the physical pleasure of the contact and he can't follow the pattern of thought in the weapon's words.

"I don't mind, you know." Spirit rests his hand against Stein's forehead for a minute before going back to stroking his hair. "But I worry about you. I'll be around as long as you want me to be but I'm worried that I won't be able to find you someday, that you'll stop listening, and I'll never get you back." The tone is still lighter than it should be but less than it was. The voices in Stein's head, the constant hum of static, is fading into the background, edging back from the intrusion of the weapon's calm words. Stein closes his eyes and lets the words seep into his blood and persuade it to move through his veins again.

"It's nice to be needed." Spirit is talking to himself now. Stein isn't sure the words have been directed at him at all, or if they once were his lack of response has turned the focus back to Spirit's inner monologue. "I like that you need me. You're so much better than I am at everything else. Not that I like it when you get like this -" the hand in Stein's hair tightens into a fist for a minute, "- but I worry that you would leave me otherwise." The sound of a laugh with a surprising amount of actual humor in it. "I mean who else would put up with you?"

Stein wishes he had control of his mouth or his hands yet. He wants to tell Spirit that the weapon is everything, that the idea of him being 'better' is utterly absurd, that without the older boy he would be lost, that without Spirit he doesn't know how to live or breathe or exist. He wants to pull Spirit down on top of him, to press his lips against Spirit's and *show* him how much he needs him, but his body is unresponsive still and all he can do is appreciate the irony and wait for Spirit to bring him back.

Spirit is still talking. "Who would put up with *me*?" That laugh again. "We're a great pair. No one else could stand us and we can't make do without each other." His fingers trail down Stein's arm. The meister sucks in a breath at the contact. It's the first inhale he is conscious of taking since he came back to himself this time, and it means he can talk again.

"Spirit." His voice sounds harsh in his throat. He must have been screaming in his fugue this time, although he can't remember it.

Spirit huffs not-quite-a-laugh. "You never call me that. You must be really messed up this time."

Stein smiles before he wonders if he can. "Senpai. Happy now?"

"Yes, thank you." When Spirit speaks Stein imagines he can feel the vibrations of the sound trembling through the floor and soaking into his still body. When Spirit breathes, Stein imagines the weapon's existence spilling over him and dragging the cold cells of his body back into living heat.

Every time Stein loses himself, he worries that Spirit won't be there. Without Spirit he will wander the darkness of his madness alone forever; he lacks the strength to bring himself back, lacks a reason to return to sanity. Spirit's touch is reason itself, Spirit's presence the strength he needs. Spirit has been there every time since they became partners, pulling Stein back into sanity and existence before Stein even realizes he's there. Stein can't imagine what he would do without his partner, but the words to express himself won't come, so the best he can manage is to reach out to Spirit and grip his wrist in a too-tight hold. Spirit's hand against his skin says that he understands.


	13. No Light No Light

**No Light No Light by Florence and the Machine**

Spirit's eyes have never been so cold.

Stein is used to the constant warmth of affection in the bright blue of his weapon's gaze. He can feel it like a caress from across the room when Spirit glances at him, can count on its presence when he looks up from insomnia-fueled projects to catch the tolerant half-smile on Spirit's lips. That amused pleasure is nowhere in them anymore.

Then again, Stein supposes Spirit isn't his anymore either.

"I'm leaving," the weapon announces, as if his expression hadn't done all the talking for him. "I can't imagine you're surprised, really. You're way too good at keeping on top of things to be surprised by this but I thought I should tell you anyway." He clears creeping emotion from his throat and continues. "We'll both be better with someone else, with different partners. I'm holding you back and I - I know you're not good for me. I don't know how much you will care anyway, really, and that's the problem too, but anyway. I'm going because I don't think you'll care enough to do it yourself and one of us needs to."

There is nothing Stein can do to call back the flickering heat of their partnership to Spirit's expression, but he tries anyway. "Don't go, Spirit. Stay." The words come out flat and monotone and he is cringing internally but he doesn't know how to modulate his tone into the hills and valleys that will adequately express his desire, and besides he's *not* surprised, and the resignation lacing his blood makes it hard to fight what he knows is a losing battle.

Spirit huffs a sigh and shuts his eyes for a moment before he looks back up. "Why? Just give me a reason, Stein."

There is no reason and far too many at the same time. Stein would give Spirit whatever the weapon asked, whatever words the weapon needed, to convince him to stay, but he doesn't know what the older boy wants or needs from him, and that's been the problem all along and the meister hasn't found a solution, not in years of searching. He is a scientist, not a poet, and he lacks the grace of expression to tell Spirit that the weapon completes him, that Spirit is there in every breath and every thought and every motion, that he hasn't slept a night since they met without dreaming of his partner. Spirit fills his negative space and calms the static in his mind and warms the cold corners of his heart that Stein thought long abandoned.

Spirit needs a confession. He is waiting for the grand epiphany, for the curtain on Stein's interiority to draw back and expose the truth the meister has kept hidden, but Stein doesn't know what to say, how much or how little he needs to express, and so he does what he at least *knows* is the wrong thing and stays silent. In the silence he can hold back the details that Spirit doesn't want to know, the experiments and the scars and the obsession, the dark side of the confession that would push the weapon out the doorway he is already standing in.

From the pool of his silence he can see Spirit pull back, can see the last possibility of return fade and die in his eyes. The blaze of color is like the cold burn of a winter sun, all blinding beautiful radiance and no heat and no forgiveness. Stein would cry if he could, if only to relieve the pressure of loss rising in his chest, but all his emotions are gone with Spirit and there is nothing left in him but the emptiness where he used to be.


	14. Rolling in the Deep

**Rolling in the Deep by Adele**

The worst part is knowing what could have been. Spirit wishes that he could have left his memories with his meister, abandoned the knowledge as he abandoned the laboratory so he could have actually made a clean start. Instead he has to carry them with him, take the good along with the half-healed injuries across his body as a permanent reminder of Stein in the back of his head.

Spirit would have stayed. He knows this, deep in his soul, knows it like he knows how to breathe, better than he knows his own name or the shape of his hands. If Stein had asked he would have stayed. He couldn't have turned down the request, not with his heart beating in time with Stein's as it has. Stein could have asked and Spirit would have turned around, would have forced things to work, would have let Stein take scalpels to his skin and learned to enjoy it, would have given over everything that made him him and let the meister remake him into his own image or whatever image it is the younger boy needs. Spirit would have stayed for years, for a lifetime, would have been Stein's partner and friend and lover all at once.

Stein has owned Spirit's heart for years. Spirit didn't have a grand realization of this; he just always knew, in the back of his head, that he would live and breathe and die for his meister, and he never had any reason to question it. He has been there for Stein when the meister didn't need him, when he did need him, when the younger boy didn't even realize he was there. Spirit would have thrown himself into madness after Stein rather than leave the other boy to it alone.

Spirit thought he could withstand anything. Enemies, violence, madness, pain, he was ready to take it all by Stein's side. But he didn't count on Stein pushing him away himself. Between the meister's distance and the meister's madness there was nothing for Spirit to hold to. If Stein had wanted him to stay, nothing would have torn Spirit from his side, but the meister was the one pushing him away and Spirit would do *anything* for his partner. Even leave, if that's what Stein wanted.

Right up until the end, Spirit hoped that he was wrong, that Stein didn't want him gone. He kept watching for a break in the meister's facade, for any glimmer of affection or hurt or *something*, but there was never anything for him to see but the coldness and the distance, even when he finally told Stein he was leaving. It would have taken a word, a sound, a touch, to keep him there.

But there was nothing. So he left Stein behind and took his memories and his scars with him, and now when Spirit closes his eyes he can see what could have been, what their partnership could and should have been, and he traces his fingers along the raised skin crossing his chest and lets tears wash away the possibilities.


	15. Someday

**Someday by Nickelback**

Sometimes Stein wishes he could see the chain of cause-and-effect that led to this situation. He knows there must have been a point where things could have been averted, when he could have done or said something to turn he and Spirit aside from the descent they are tumbling down now. It is too late now, that he is certain of; no matter how much he may want to, there is a coldness in Spirit's eyes that says Stein has burned too many bridges, picked too many fights, betrayed too much trust to go back to the beginning and start afresh.

He hates to see Spirit like this. The weapon was made for forgiveness and easy affection, not the slow-burning grudge that Stein's actions have pushed him to. Stein knows that Spirit blames him, that opening that barely-clotted wound will solve nothing, but he doesn't know when the turning point was if not his unasked experimentation. He is certain that it was sometime before that first anesthetized cut, because when he was standing over Spirit his motions were as pre-determined and impossible to fight as anything he has ever felt, but when he traces it back he thinks it might have started that first day they met when they were still children, and he shies away from the fatalism implicit in that explanation.

Spirit has almost finished packing his things. The paraphernalia of his life has been encapsulated into boxes beyond the reach of Stein's eyes and hands and thoughts; now there's just a few stray clothes and the weapon himself, currently staring at Stein with the flatness that is so foreign to his face.

"What do you want, Stein." Spirit's monotone kills the question of the sentence, but there is a spark in his eyes that screams of his anger in spite of the cool facade of his voice. It almost makes Stein smile, although he knows that will just fan the heat of the other boy's anger. His weapon - still his, for now, though not for long - has never been any good at hiding any of his emotions even when he tries. And Stein has been too good at the same, he knows, the two of them crossing and recrossing in an attempt to find a middle ground that ultimately turned out to be illusory. He wants to open his mouth and let the truth spill out, tell Spirit that he dreams of his hair and his eyes and his skin, that the weapon is all he has ever wanted or needed, that he has been pushing the other boy away because he couldn't bear to confess when his feelings were new and now he cannot turn back to find a point when such an explanation would have made sense. He wants to ask Spirit to stay, to come back to him, to forgive him the vast sea of mistakes he has made and start over so they can rewrite their history with the story it should have been. But Spirit's expression speaks louder than his words and anything Stein says at this point will not, cannot be enough. The weapon has made his decision, made up his mind and made his choice long weeks ago; this is just the final conclusion of the story that Stein himself started to write.

He wants to tell Spirit that it will be okay. Even though his throat is closed up with unshed tears and frustrated desire, even though the weight of his impending loneliness is taking his breath with anticipated horror, Stein knows it will be okay. He will fix this like he has fixed everything in his life before. He may not be able to keep things from breaking - prevention has never been his forte - but no one can stitch together shattered pieces like he can. He doesn't know how he will achieve this, he doesn't know when, but his utter certainty leaves no room for self-doubt.

If he could find the words to express it to Spirit, maybe the weapon would stay. If he could find the words, maybe the weapon wouldn't be leaving in the first place. But Stein has never been good at prevention. All he can do is watch Spirit pack in a silence loaded with the things he needs to say and can't and tell himself that someday the weapon will be back. When Spirit is his again, when he is Spirit's again, he will rewrite their ending.


	16. Kryptonite

**Kryptonite by 3 Door Down**

There is only so much that Stein has ever been able to do. He can delay the surge of madness in him, he can fight it back or buy himself an hour or a day or a week, but when he knows it is coming delay is the most he can manage. He can give warning; he can't directly prevent its effects.

He is always afraid that he will wake up alone. He can recall what occurs during the periods of insanity but only after he comes back into himself. There is only ever the retrospective guilt; he never has the option to change his behavior at the time when the urge first hits. Stein knows perfectly well that Spirit is tolerant at best of his periodic descent into hedonistic sadism. Spirit is always the last thought before he drops over the edge and the first upon clawing his way back into rationality. Thus far Spirit has been there every time, waiting a room away or running his fingers across Stein's skin, the sound of his voice calling the meister back.

Stein knows eventually it will be too much. Everyone leaves in time. Lord Death needs him, wants his strength and his potential as much as Stein himself wants the tentative acceptance of the Academy to protect him from the fallout of his own actions, but there is a vast chasm of difference between turning a blind eye to the actions of one meister among dozens and ignoring the dangerous instability of one's own partner. There will come a time when it will be too much for Spirit, when the weapon will be gone when Stein resurfaces. The meister doesn't know what he will do when that time comes and he tries to push the possibility away every time the unavoidable truth of it rises in his mind. It is like his own mortality, an inescapable fact that he manages to hide behind triviality until he forgets it is there at all. If he knew that Spirit would leave him, knew that his own isolation is speeding toward him as rapidly as it is, Stein is not sure he would ever return from the brink of permanent madness.

So he avoids it, he pushes it away, and he loses himself in the momentary comfort of Spirit this time, this awakening, and every time he is surprised that the weapon is still here and every time he avoids the background to that surprise as best he can. He isn't sure he can let Spirit go, isn't sure he knows how to live without the other boy in his life. Spirit is the reason he bothers returning to sanity. When the siren song of madness dims in his head, it is for the warmth of Spirit's skin and the curve of Spirit's lips that he returns to reality. Spirit can say or do whatever he likes, call Stein crazy, call Stein a genius, hit or kiss or touch him, just so long as he *stays*.

Stein will stay with Spirit as long as the weapon lets him. He can watch life float past him with the burnt-out amusement of cynicism, let the insanity take him without a fight, as long as he has Spirit. Everything comes back to the older boy, in the end, all the struggle of living and all the delayed pain of the madness; everything is worth it for the color of the weapon's hair and the blue of his eyes and the ease of his smile. Spirit can hate him or like him or love him or all together, as long as he stays.


	17. How You Remind Me

**How You Remind Me by Nickelback**

Spirit doesn't know Stein has come back to Death City until the meister walks into ChupaCabra's as casually as if he is a regular customer. It's late in the evening by then and Spirit is rapidly progressing towards his preferred level of intoxication, so when he looks up and sees his old partner in the doorway, for a long minute it is very difficult to understand what is going on.

Stein takes stock of the surroundings while Spirit tries to work out what is happening and comes over to the death scythe before he has any idea what to say. When he sits down next to Spirit and pours himself a glass of sake, the weapon manages to shut his mouth enough to blurt, "What are you doing here?"

Stein looks at him sideways and raises an eyebrow as he takes a sip of his drink. "Looking for you," as if it were perfectly ordinary, as if he has always come here to find Spirit, as if Spirit hasn't been wandering through life detached and lost without Stein for the last dozen years.

Spirit has lost track of his own face in his focus on drinking in the details of Stein's - the same familiar shape of the glasses, the more adult line of his jaw, the startling green of those eyes - but Stein is watching him sideways, and after a moment the meister smiles and reaches out to touch Spirit's chin with two fingers.

"Shut your mouth, senpai. You look like you're talking to a ghost."

Spirit does as he is told. He is past the point of arguing with commands in general and he has always obeyed Stein unthinkingly.

"What -" He isn't sure what he wants to say, either there isn't enough to say or far too much, and he can't simplify either into a single sentence. "You're back?"

Stein nods. It is singularly unsatisfying as an answer, only a tiny improvement over stoic silence. Spirit sighs in exasperation. "Why? Why now? You've been gone *so long* and left me -" he had intended that to be 'us' but the more accurate pronoun emerged instead, "- alone with no explanation and no expectation and I - I didn't think I was ever going to see you again." He isn't angry, not yet, just shocked and *confused* and *ecstatic*, so happy and so surprised that he can't let himself think about it at all or he will burst into inexplicable tears.

Stein looks at his hands but that smile is still there at the edges of his mouth. "I left. It seemed best at the time. That changed and I'm back."

"That's *it*?" Spirit is on the verge of tears and laughter simultaneously with the over-emotional surges of a little too much alcohol. "I -" Words abandon him and emotion rises in his throat and now he's crying, again, as usual, the lubrication of drink pulling on the wellspring of misery in him like turning on a tap, but he's never cried in front of Stein before. He turns his head away because even drinking in the sight of his long-lost partner isn't enough to overcome the shame of the breakdown and he can't hold back the tears and he hopes that Stein will let him hold the illusion of calm behind the curtain of his hair.

Stein's hand comes to rest between his shoulderblades. "Senpai. Come with me."

When Stein stands, Spirit follows like his muscles aren't under his control anymore. He is trying to cling to control but it is fading fast, and he is intensely relieved when Stein makes the excuses for them and the polite small talk as they leave. "Death Scythe has had enough for the night, I think," the meister laughs, and Spirit keeps his head down and tries to look drunk instead of teary and tries to not think about the way his new name sounds in Stein's voice.

The cover of darkness is a relief. Stein keep his hand against Spirit's back, uses it to steer him down the street and around the edge of an alley where they are out of the illumination of the streetlights and the view of late-night wanderer before he grips Spirit's shoulders and turns him around so they are facing each other.

"Senpai." Stein's characteristic monotone is bleeding emotion, his hold on Spirit's shoulders painfully hard. "Are you okay?"

Spirit can't look up, can't bring his face up from the protection of shadow. He tries to nod but the movement breaks the tightness in his throat and he sobs, and then Stein is pulling him in so Spirit's forehead presses awkwardly against the meister's shoulder and Stein is wrapping his arms around the weapon as if he has ever touched Spirit this much before, as if this is *normal*.

Spirit is sobbing properly now. He wants to curl in on himself but his hands are coming around to clutch at the back of Stein's coat, to hold Stein where he is, to make sure the meister doesn't leave again. "Why did you go?" He doesn't consciously decide to speak but he has lost control of a lot of things already; it's not a surprise that his words have taken the initiative.

"I'm sorry." The tone is startlingly sincere but the words themselves are so shocking that they bring Spirit's head up so he can stare at Stein. The nearest streetlight is at Stein's back, so the meister's face is cast in shadow, but words are coming up Spirit's throat again along with the awful hiccuping of proper tears and he's talking anyway.

"I'm been such a *mess* without you. I can't sleep, I can't stay sober, I can't *fight*. I'm the worst excuse for a death scythe ever, I can't even hold it together through a day on my own. Lord Death can't count on me if an emergency comes up, my daughter won't speak to me, the best I have is forgetfulness and that only until I wake up with a hangover. I used to make sense. I used to be worth something. I thought it would be fine but when you left I forgot what made me myself and I don't think it was ever me at all, I think it's been a huge lie all this time." He is sobbing and he can feel his face flushing with the heat of emotion and he is sure he is an entire mess, and this is not how he imagined his reunion with the meister - his mental image was all cool distance and icy silence, not this excessively emotional breakdown - but he hasn't expected Stein to come back, not since the first few months passed, and it has been *years* of chasing brief oblivion and escapist entertainment and it is too much to have his meister back and here and with him.

Stein is pulling hard at his shoulders, shifting his body so he can fit his shoulder under Spirit's chin and press them together. Spirit stops fighting the closeness, tightens his grip on Stein so he's not sure which of them is pulling harder and they are sharing body heat between them. Stein turns his head so his mouth is pressed into Spirit's hair and makes a sound something like a sob and Spirit has to ignore it because if *Stein* is crying he will never be able to pull himself back together.

"Goddamn it, Stein, I'm so *glad* you're back," he chokes out. "I don't know who I am without you."

Stein laughs. That at least Spirit can handle. "You're my partner, senpai."

Spirit shuts his eyes and lets the world rearrange itself into reason around Stein.


	18. Losing My Religion

**Losing My Religion by R.E.M.**

It used to be hard for Stein to recall that Spirit is a different person. When they first began working together, it was easy to forget the boundaries between them, to let the distinction blur into nothing so they were two semi-separate pieces of a whole, a heart and a mind, a soul and a body, each useless without the other.

It's easy to remember now. When Stein finally caves in to exhaustion and lets his worn-out body collapse into rest, his mind falls into the hallucinatory pre-sleep fear he strives to avoid with insomnia and reminds him, points out the ever-widening space between himself and his partner, whispers that two distinct entities can be separated at any moment, that there is nothing in particular to keep them together, and facing that knowledge is worse than the oblivion of death. To lose Spirit, to face the immensity of the world without his partner, is too terrifying to face and too dangerous to turn away from, and Stein's body rests while his mind wanders the feverish nightmares of his unavoidable knowledge.

It is a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy. Stein can /see/ Spirit drifting away, can sense the distance between them widening with every pause in Spirit's speech and every tilt of the other boy's head, but without his partner's intuition to pull from he has absolutely no way to fix whatever is broken, whatever has changed. All he can do is cling the tighter to what still exists and feel the meaning of his life slipping through his fingers anyway.

Stein plays a temporary balancing act, trailing in Spirit's shadow, trying to understand his partner, trying to follow whatever unspoken thoughts are spiraling through the older boy's head, trying to say enough and trying to keep his own secrets and trying to cover up the endless hurt that is under everything for him now. He keeps it locked up when Spirit is awake, waits until the weapon has slipped into what Stein hopes is blissful unconsciousness before he lets his body fold in on itself, before he collapses against the wall of his room and shuts his eyes and lets the still-pleasant delusions of consciousness take over his head.

With his eyes shut, Stein can picture Spirit's smile as he hasn't seen it in years. He can call up the light of affection, the warmth of something maybe more into the weapon's blue eyes. He can recall the sound of Spirit's voice, the crackle of his laugh like the depth to a record, the flush of heat under his own skin at the feel of Spirit's fingers on his wrist or Spirit's knee against his leg or Spirit's hair against his shoulder. Stein's mind fills the room with dozens of ephemeral Spirits, Spirit from two years ago, Spirit when they met, Spirit after their last assignment, but eventually his skin goes cold and the hallucinatory sounds fade from his grasp and he opens his eyes to an empty room. They are only images anyway, idols to represent a god that Stein is losing in spite of his best efforts to keep.


	19. Please Don't Leave Me

**Please Don't Leave Me by P!nk**

When Stein slams the door to his room the jolt runs straight up his arm and tingles down his spine. For a moment the vibration is satisfying, pooling into his irrational rage and feedbacking with pleasure. Then it evaporates and there is nothing but the cold fear again, the terror that is always there in the back of his head. He drops to the floor, leans back against the weight of the door, reaches up to cover his face with his hand.

He has no idea how things have gotten to this point. There was a time when his life was simple, when living with Spirit was as easy as breathing, when there was just the warm certainty of his partner and their relationship gently existing in the back of his mind. When it started to change it was too slow to track, too quiet to stop, and now he can barely be in the same room with Spirit without the tension between them climbing into a fight. Spirit always ends up yelling at him about something - about his experiments, about his silence, about his distance - and if Stein waits long enough they end up fighting about Stein's stoicism, about all the things Stein doesn't say and won't let himself feel. It's not that Spirit picks the fights, although he thinks he does. Stein knows what is happening: he deliberately needles the older boy into an explosion before falling back into aggressive silence that Spirit will beat himself bloody on while Stein just watches him, letting the weapon express all the emotion that he can't himself. Eventually Spirit's quick-burning anger fizzles out, he drops his arms, his eyes go damp with tears, and he'll start to get to the *point*, start to touch on what Stein never wants to talk about, what they must talk about if they are to last, what the meister can't bring himself to confess. That, every time, is the point at which Stein gets up and walks back to his room. He never lets his face show anything - the self-destructive part of him knows that his lack of reaction will just drive Spirit away and relishes that knowledge. The weapon can't win a fight against a wall. The only thing Stein ever gives in to is the urge to pull the door shut as hard as he can so the sound echoes off the walls of the house and temporarily deafens him.

Spirit knows perfectly well that *something* is wrong. It's clear in the spaces between them, in the stiffness in Stein's shoulders, in the awkward weight of their conversations; even Stein can feel it, there's no way that the uncontrolled empathy of his partner would fail to pick up on the tension. What Spirit doesn't know is the cause. He keeps trying on new subjects, pushing different topics in an attempt to get a rise out of the meister, but he has no idea of the actual issue and thus far Stein's knowledge has been safe within his own head.

Because the meister knows. Of course he knows. He has known ever since he first Resonated with the other boy, known as soon as a brief separation from Spirit began to ache in his chest like a physical wound. He recognizes the jealousy in him when anyone else touches his partner. He realized the moment his experimentation went from clinical curiosity to frustrated self-expression, when Spirit changed from a test subject to a canvas for his silenced emotions. He can sense the fear rising in him, occasionally vanishing beneath the immediacy of anger but always surging back into the void afterwards. At this point it is like a bitterness on the back of his tongue, a constant stinging panic that interrupts his sleep and speeds his breathing.

Spirit is going to leave him. The fact of that is becoming more coldly real every day, with every smile Spirit gives someone else and every angry shout the weapon gives him. Spirit is going to leave him and there is nothing that Stein can do to stop it. He wants to ask the older boy to stay, wants to drop to his knees and beg and plead for the weapon to stay with him, to hold him to reality and remind him how to feel and keep him breathing, but Stein lacks the poetry to express himself and emotion closes his throat until he can't get the words out, and then Spirit ends up expressing the tangled feelings for the both of them and the opportunity is never there. So instead Spirit cries into the couch in the empty living room while Stein closes his eyes and whispers his pleas into the air too softly for the other boy to ever hear.


	20. Blow Me (One Last Kiss)

**Blow Me (One Last Kiss) by P!nk**

Spirit has finally had enough.

He doesn't know why it should be today of all days. It's been a bad day - worse even than usual - but there have been bad days before. Stein has been colder than he is being today, has said more hurtful things, has condescended more than he is now. In the past Spirit has taken a deep breath, he has stepped back from the situation, he has let Stein win the fight and retreated and patched up his feelings and his sense of justice and come back to meekly ask for more the next day. Nothing is different about today except for the wall of frustration in his head, but his back is up against it and he can't back down anymore.

When he comes in to the meister's room, Stein doesn't even look up from his desk. He is bent over something that Spirit doesn't want to know the details of and his shoulders don't even jerk at the sound of the door bouncing hard off the inside wall.

"I'm working," he says, as if that in and of itself should gain a cringing retreat from his weapon. Sometimes it does, but not today.

"Stein." Spirit's voice doesn't shake, doesn't go shrill. He is relieved; it is unusual for him to maintain control over his voice during a fight, and he knows that is exactly what he is careening towards right now. When the meister doesn't respond, he repeats himself. "Stein."

"I'm work-" the younger boy starts and Spirit talks over him. "Stop working."

There is a long pause. Stein's shoulders go stiff, his neck unbends so his back is perfectly straight, and he slowly spins his chair so he can face his weapon. Spirit knows the look that is in the meister's eyes, the cold judgment that demands to know what Spirit has to say that is so intensely important. He's never been able to convince those eyes that his concerns are worthwhile in the past; he suspects tonight will be no exception.

"Stein." The meister is staring at him, his expression just short of a glare because there's not enough heat in the ice it contains. "I fucking *told* you. You promised you *wouldn't.*"

There is not the faintest flicker of guilt in those green eyes. Spirit always looks for it and it is never there, it never has been. There is no reason for it to be there tonight. "I lied."

Spirit's rage flares up but it melds with the determination filling his muscles with strength and his thoughts with focus. Usually this would devolve into screaming, but once he starts screaming he has lost and the rational part of his brain knows it.

"Get out."

That gets a twinge of confusion, if nothing else, from the meister. "What?"

"Get out." Spirit stands to the side of the door to give Stein room to leave, even though the other boy has shown no signs of moving. "Get out of my apartment."

"Don't be ridiculous." There's the condescension, right on schedule. "This is *my room*, s-"

Spirit can't stand the implied affection of the honorific on Stein's lips, steps on the younger boy's words to cut it off. "This is *my body*, but that didn't stop you from experimenting on it. *Again.*" The word is loaded with sarcasm but the meister doesn't blink at that either. He still looks faintly confused and nothing else.

Spirit sighs. There is suddenly nothing but the weight of determination in his shoulders. He doesn't know when he decided to give up on this, this *everything*, but somewhere between the unresponsive expression of his meister's face and the dull ache of unhealed injuries he made the final commitment to resignation tonight. "Get out of my apartment, Stein. I don't want you here while I'm asleep."

Stein's confusion clears into internalized amusement. He rises to his feet, steps towards the weapon. "Come on, senpai, I don't think you-"

"Don't call me that!" Spirit steps backward into the hallway, slaps away the hand coming up to touch his face. "You *lied* to me. I can't trust you and I don't want you around."

"Se - Spirit." His name sounds oddly formal on the meister's tongue. "We're partners. We can sort this out. It'll be fine."

Spirit shakes his head. His eyes are hot and heavy with unshed tears but his voice is as calm as Stein's. "There's nothing to be done anymore." The movement jostles the clinging moisture loose and a tear trails across his face. "There's nothing left."

When Spirit cries, it always means the fight is over. Spirit knows this as well as Stein; the moment he gives in to his emotions the meister has the upper hand and the battle is won. This is a strange feeling, like the sorrow is someone else's or at least irrelevant to his current state; the tears are overflowing but they have no effect on his mental conviction. Stein must see some or all of this in his face; the amused affection is gone, rapidly shifting into something that Spirit would call panic on any face but Stein's.

"Senpai-"

"Get out." Spirit's volume has gone down, not up, but something in his voice flares Stein's expression into further intensity. Stein opens his mouth to speak, looks at Spirit's face for a very long moment, shuts his mouth. When he looks away from the weapon, Spirit knows he has won, although this has never happened before. When he steps past the older boy in the doorway, Spirit feels a flash of pleasure in his victory. When his footsteps retreat down the hall, Spirit stays where he is.

When the front door closes behind him, Spirit wants to collapse into proper tears. He wants to go running after his meister, apologize for throwing him out, bring him back and make it up to him. He wants to fold himself on the meister's bed, bury his face in the sheets that hold the smell of Stein's skin, and cry himself to sleep waiting for the meister to come home to him.

The pull of stitches across his abdomen, the ache of open wounds against his shoulderblades, stops him. He is still crying - there is not much he can do about that at this point - but he deliberately turns his back on the room, blocking out the visuals of Stein's existence, and heads towards his own. The house is full of Stein, full of the memory of his touch and the sound of his laugh and the pressure of his skin on Spirit's. Spirit has to get out, has to leave, or he will go out looking for the other boy and all this will be undone. He has been trying too long, holding this relationship together too hard, forcing compromise when there is none and has been none for a long time.

When he changes, he carefully thinks of the sound of girls' laughter instead of the shape of Stein's half-smirk. When he leaves the apartment, he thinks of bringing a stranger home instead of the familiarity of his partner's company. When he steps into the club, he thinks of dancing instead of lying tangled on the couch with the younger boy. But when he orders a drink to clear away his memories he is thinking of Stein, and when he downs it he is thinking of past innocence.


	21. Breakeven

**Breakeven by The Script**

Spirit looks so *calm*. That's the worst part. Ever before Spirit has been the one crumbling while Stein stays calm, Stein holding them together while Spirit bleeds off the emotions for the two of them. They have been two pieces of a whole, a single functioning unit with no discernable line between them. And now, when Spirit tells Stein he is leaving, that that invisible break is about to become all-too-wide and all-too-real, he has stolen all of Stein's control and left all the emotions to the meister.

Stein can't even talk. His throat feels like it's closing up around the words he can't find for his feelings. His eyes are strangely hot, like there is blistering heat rising up from behind them, and the skin of his face is flushing alternately hot and cold in a way he can't explain. Since he fell back to collapse onto the couch behind him - were it not for that he's fairly certain he would have just hit the floor - he has been unable to move, unable to will life back into his veins or work his muscles or make a sound or do anything but stare at Spirit and let the weapon's words seep into his perplexed brain.

"She's asked me to be her partner." Spirit half-smiles, his eyes sympathetic but clear and his voice tinged with pleasure instead of with misery. "She wants to make me a death weapon, so I can be Lord Death's personal scythe."

What about me? Stein wants to wail. What about our partnership? I *need* you, you can't *leave* like this.

"You don't want to make me a death weapon." Spirit shrugs. "That's okay. You don't have to just because I want to. She'll be a good meister to get me the rest of the way there."

Stein can't explain. He can't speak, he can barely breathe around the rising knot in his throat, he can't put words to the pain of understanding rising in him or to the emotion binding him to passivity. He certainly can't explain that he doesn't want to *lose* Spirit, that he has delayed the final steps because he can't bear the thought of *anyone* else wielding the weapon, even Lord Death. He didn't think he *had* to explain. Spirit has always done the feeling for the both of them. Stein thought Spirit *knew*, and now Spirit is smiling and his eyes are alight with anticipation and Stein's are burning with pain and his mouth won't even obey him long enough for him to beg Spirit to stay.

"And she loves me." Spirit is properly smiling now, the softness of his lips curving up so the joy touches the blue in his eyes and his chin tipping down in a futile attempt to protect the privacy of the emotion. "I don't know *why*, exactly, but she does and she says she'll marry me."

*I* love you, Stein's head screams, but he doesn't know how to say the words, isn't sure he's ever said those words before in all his life. He didn't even have them in his head until Spirit echoed the surging emotion in his blood; without the weapon Stein doesn't even know how to name the things he feels.

"That's great, senpai." Stein has never told a lie so large. His voice cracks, almost-a-sob coming through so he doesn't recognize the vibration of his own words in his chest, and he tilts his head almost-deliberately so the light of the lamp blinding him skates off his glasses and hides his eyes,

Spirit's faces relaxes. He is still smiling, but this is relieved-and-happy-smile, not affectionate-internal-daydream-smile. "I'm so glad you understand. I knew you would." He reaches out to touch Stein's shoulder, to tighten his fingers so they dig into Stein's skin for just a moment, and then he is gone and there is only Stein. Alone.

Stein focuses on his breathing. He lets the pulse of blood through his veins and the steady pound of his heart and the brush of clothes against his skin settle into his mind. They are proof that he is alive, and that is all he can be sure of right now. He thought he and Spirit were a team, that he had as much to offer as the weapon. It might even have been true to start. But now the silence is rushing in to fill the hole Spirit is leaving, and the older boy is walking out with a smile and himself, and without those Stein is left with only remnants of himself.

"Please don't," he whispers, so quiet he can barely hear himself. It's the start of a prayer, a plea to someone, but Spirit is taking any faith Stein had too. Spirit's all Stein's ever believed in.


	22. Try

**Try by P!nk**

Spirit thinks about Stein all the time. It started out as occasional unsettling déjà vu, when a particular Resonance with Kami would remind him of the meister or a voice down a hall would trigger a long-buried memory. At first it was easy to push aside, to laugh off the connection and move on with his life, but as his relationship with Kami splintered apart and Spirit's life careened downward the memories came more frequently and became harder to push away. The night Kami left him, Spirit drank until the empty echo of his house filled with hallucinated sounds and remembered images of the younger man. It was easier than being alone.

He doesn't remember everything that happened that night. After a point the alcohol walled off his access to long-term memory, and with no one else to see the events of the evening were lost to blissful ignorance. Spirit woke up on the floor with a splitting headache, a terrible taste in his mouth, and a smile from a dream fading too fast to hold.

Spirit dreams of Stein nearly every night after that, as if the vacuum Kami left behind is pulling his lost memories forward from the vaults of the past. The hallucinations conform to Spirit's memories, usually just recollections of trivial interactions but cast in the warm glow of nostalgia. When he wakes he tries to pull the memories back to reality, waiting for the nausea of his hangover to fade while he forces objectivity onto the images behind his eyelids, but his mind refuses to obey and he ends up lost in his thoughts while his fingers trace the patterns of scars fading more rapidly than his recollections.

He expects it to be worse when he sees Stein again. Avoiding the meister long-term is futile, he knows even as he attempts it, and the first time they see each other again Spirit is too panicked to behave normally or to rein in his reactions to Stein's deliberate needling. But the transition from casual conversation into combat happens so fast Spirit has to fall back on his habitual interactions rather than going stiff with the years of silence, and that night he thinks about the ease of Stein's smile and the warmth of his laugh instead of the strangeness of Resonating with his meister after over a decade apart. It is easier to enumerate the differences than to consider how much is the same because the list is so much shorter, and in the usual late-night fuzz of intoxication the changes all look like positive ones.

Spirit stops being able to remember why he left Stein in the first place. Every interaction is terrifyingly easy and every shared smile threads their lives back together until Spirit is sure it is only his resistance that keeps them apart at all. Every time Stein looks at him the blood rises hot and uncontrolled under Spirit's skin like the meister's gaze is a fire, and sometimes Stein's fingers will linger a little too long on Spirit's wrist or shoulder or arm and leave an reactive imprint when they go.. Spirit pulls these up in his memory again and again, knowing that recalling them too fast will take the shine of possibility off, but he can't help himself. He drowns himself in the pleasure of potential until it all fades, until he is convinced that he will never be anything worthwhile, that Stein has moved on and up while he has slipped downward and they can never bridge the gap between them and there is nothing for him anymore but the dreary trudge of habit dragging him forward.

Spirit has no idea what it is that finally makes the difference, what pushes him out the door one evening instead of locking him in a stasis of regret and self-loathing. Perhaps it was an inevitable conclusion of too many nights of lonely reminiscence. Maybe it was a serendipitous amount of alcohol granting him courage before all the shine had worn off that day's memories. He doesn't realize what he's doing until he's out the door and striding through the streets of the city, and by then it's easier to keep moving forward than to turn around. He doesn't consider stopping until he can see the laboratory on the horizon, and when he does he comes to a standstill in the middle of the street and just stares at it for several long minutes. The night-cold air would be uncomfortable if he weren't flushed with his earlier libations, and he would be self-conscious if the same didn't lock him in his own head, but luckily he is warm and distant with alcohol and his focus can turn entirely inward while he debates whether to carry on or turn back.

It is the thought of the darkness of his house, and the faint glow of light from the building in front of him, that pulls him forward. He is tracing his skin again, outlining the scars across his chest and abdomen while he wonders if this is anything like the pull moths feel towards flame. His self-awareness probably makes it worse, he decides. This would be easier if he didn't fear the pain of the fire. But he's moving forward anyway. Scars fade, burns heal, but regret will crush him if he doesn't move.

The sound of his fist on the door of the laboratory is tiny. The weight and size of the building swallow the proof of Spirit's existence without a ripple, and he's not sure that anyone inside can hear him. The empty halls on the other side reverberate sound back on itself, though, so he hears the approaching footsteps well before the door actually opens.

Stein doesn't say anything when he sees Spirit. He just goes still, watching him like the weapon is an interesting anomaly and he is waiting for its next move. Spirit realizes his fingers are still tracing the web of red through the fabric of his shirt and lets his hand drop to his side. He doesn't know what he wants to say, so he just lets the reality of Stein's presence blister into his skin while he waits for inspiration to rise.

"Hi," is what he finally manages. He sounds normal, but the timing and the expectation built by the preceding silence makes the salutation ridiculous in context.

"Are you drunk?" No condemnation, just a request for more data.

Spirit shakes his head in negative, and the world stays firm which is a good argument for him being correct. "No. Not yet."

Stein wants to ask. His mouth doesn't move, his eyes don't even flicker with curiosity, but Spirit can feel the desire to know pulsing under the meister's skin in time with his heartbeat.

"I want to come back," he offers up to that unspoken request, an explanation and a plea at once.

That gets him a reaction, a visible once this time, in the form of a fluttering blink of confusion. Stein opens his mouth, pauses before he speaks. "I hurt you."

Spirit can't deny it. "Yes." But it doesn't matter, he doesn't say. Stein's face relaxes with understanding of the unvoiced follow-up. "Let's just…try it."

Stein doesn't speak, but Spirit knows he accepts well before the meister shifts his feet to step aside, before Stein raises his hand in mute invitation into the laboratory. The door feels like protection instead of a barrier from this side when it swings shut, and in comparison with the night's darkness the dim lighting of the hallway illuminates colors in Stein's eyes and highlights in his hair Spirit has never seen before.

When Stein threads his fingers through Spirit's hair, the weapon almost flinches from the warmth, and when his mouth brushes against Spirit's it feels like a brand, but Spirit's fingers are tangling with Stein's against the marked skin of his chest and the burns are a small price to pay for the comfort of the heat.


	23. Just Give Me a Reason

**Just Give Me a Reason by P!nk**

Stein doesn't believe in fate. It's not scientific, it's not reasonable, it's not /real/. There can be no such thing as destiny, not if the world is to maintain the freedom to be cold and cruel and dispassionate.

Stein doesn't need destiny to love Spirit. He doesn't need faith in some sort of master plan, some romanticized conclusion of their relationship, in order to have faith in Spirit. He has accepted that Spirit left him - it would be difficult to do otherwise, confronted with the painful reality of such. It is not that Stein has been /waiting/ for Spirit to return. It is simply that he has been loving him, wanting him, dreaming of him, for all the years they have been apart.

Stein won't beg Spirit to stay, won't beg him to come back like they are the leads in some overwrought novel. Life goes on and feelings change and there is no particular reason for Spirit to return his affection or to carry it as long as the meister has. But he will appreciate the shine of the sunlight breaking across Spirit's hair, lock the profile of the weapon's face into his memory, let his blood run hot at the sound of the older man's voice. That he can control, and Stein chose a long time ago to keep this part of himself intact through the years.

Spirit doesn't look at him. Spirit smiles at the new-blue sky overhead, or watches Azusa when she speaks, or looks at the palms of his shaking hands like he's never seen them before. That's okay too. Stein has become very, very good at shifting his gaze sideways, at keeping his face calm and his voice steady even when his pulse is pounding hard at his throat, at watching Spirit /all the time/ without anyone else ever seeing him.

Spirit is trying to *not* look at Stein as casually as possible. His whole body aches and he is sure it will be worse tomorrow, his daughter just survived a fight with the strongest enemy he has ever known, the world is ravaged by madness, and there are a thousand and one things he should be worrying about rather than his old meister, but the removal of the weight of the pending apocalypse that has been everpresent for months is sending his thoughts scattering like paper in a wind, and there is a question and a confession in his mind that he can no longer avoid with the excuse of more pressing concerns.

Stein looks perfectly calm. His expression is clear of the building Madness that has been lurking over the last several weeks, his eyes relaxed into the closest thing to ordinary human satisfaction that Spirit has ever seen on his face. He is smoking a cigarette, slowly, not with the frenzied pace of a panicked addict but with the deliberate savour of a luxury, and when he sighs out the smoke and the calm spill out into the air together and Spirit is /looking/ at him again and the weapon pulls his eyes away and back to his hands.

He has to do something. He has to do something /now/, before the pressure dissipates and it becomes too easy to fall back into the half-friendship they have been playing at since Stein returned to the city.

He opens his mouth to speak.  
~*~*~

"How are you feeling?"

Stein doesn't always deliberately needle Spirit, but sometimes the temptation is too great, and his curiosity about what exactly Spirit wants so badly to say is balanced by utter terror at what it /could/ be, and so he lets his instinct take over and drop into small talk just before Spirit has the nerve to initiate.

The weapon is caught off-guard. Stein is ostensibly not looking at him but he half-sees, half-senses Spirit's flickering emotions jump from surprise to irritation to confusion to panic before he stumbles over a response.

"I hurt. I hurt in places I didn't know I /could/ hurt."

"Fighting a Kishin will do that."

Spirit shrugs. The movement lacks all his usual grace; it is stiff and lopsided and unbalanced and even that is beautiful. "It's been a while since I've had a really tough fight."

*Since we were partners,* Stein's mind offers, and the meister can't think of anything sufficiently noncomittal or offhand to say to that tentative suggestion of the topic and so he lets the quiet pool until he can shift to the safer topic of the future rather than the past.

"You'll have your hands full for quite a while. Kid's going to need some support as he takes over." His voice is soft, gentle with the empathetic sorrow he has learned over the years. "It's going to be very hard for him." That's an opening too, and this time Stein's mouth continues before his head can pull it back. "It's going to be hard for all of us."

The offer is so subtle that Spirit isn't even sure it's there for a moment. He could step into it, take the hand Stein is maybe-extending, say *It would be easier with you* or *It's not been easy until now* or even *We'll have to count on each other,* but it has been so *long* since he thought of Stein as a partner and so *long* since he let the dream of their future shatter that he doesn't know if he can even find the pieces anymore. Overindulged imagination and possibilities of hints aren't enough; Spirit feels like he is on a precipice, like something wonderful might be about to happen, but he needs Stein to pull him over the edge before he can let himself drop.

So he says "Yeah," and the regret of missed opportunity floods into him as soon as the word is out, desperation paralyzing him where he sits.

Stein can't stand to make the first move. The years of unrequited reminiscence never seemed to have a downside, but now they weigh him down from taking any action, from crossing over from hints to doing, from subtle to explicit, from telling Spirit that he has scarred his mind with recollections and nostalgia as surely as he scarred Spirit's skin those years ago, that Spirit curls through his mind and his blood and his bones like a brand and a promise and a god and how can he say all this in just words? How can he offer that to a man who has moved on, whose life has continued without him, who has continued to grow and change and improve when everything about Stein has been built around this premise, that he loves Spirit Albarn as he has never loved anything or anyone else?

Spirit can't look. He can't stand to see the calm in Stein's face, the passive relaxation into the moment, when he feels that his throat is closing around a thousand explanations and a million questions and his hands ache to reach for some sort of solution, some sort of fix for what they had and what they lost and what they might find again if Stein would just say /something/, do /anything/, and maybe he's reading too much into nothing, maybe Stein doesn't feel any of this and it is just him alone in a self-made delusion, but his heart is racing too fast to calm with enforced rationality and he can no longer come back from the edge.

Each swears, later, that it was an accident, that he never meant to move his hand, that he was going to walk away, that he was going to turn his back on the desperate something that was never going to come. But when their fingers touch, accidentally or not, both stop breathing, each turns towards the other, and Stein's eyes are afraid like Spirit's and Spirit's smile is bright like Stein's and it is enough.


	24. Broken

**Broken by Seether**

When Stein turns off the lights, he can sit in the darkness and shut his eyes and imagine that Spirit is still with him. He can almost feel the texture of the weapon's hair against his fingers, the warmth of the weapon's breath against his skin, the sound of the weapon's laugh ringing in his ears. He can push away the reality of the empty house, the weight of his own singular presence, the cold that seeps into his bones, and he can lose himself momentarily.

Stein has always been different. He sees things differently, more clearly but more coldly than other people. He lives in a world of objects; some are breathing, some are not, but they are fundamentally the same in their *otherness.* Spirit was the first person Stein ever met who crossed that boundary. Sometime between their first introduction, during their first fight or their first Resonance or Spirit's persistent attempts to become friends, Spirit became part of Stein rather than part of the outside. At the time this was more confusing than anything else. Stein didn't think to consider what having part of himself in another body would do because the idea of losing Spirit was just as incomprehensible as his arm or his heart detaching while leaving him alive.

He doesn't know how to exist without Spirit. Spirit set fire to Stein's heart and opened up a whole realm of emotions, things like *trust* and *love* and *desire,* and now that he is gone there is nowhere for these foreign concepts to go and Stein is drowning in them, them and the unfamiliar pain of *loss* and *guilt* and *loneliness* and he does not know how to put himself back together around his missing weapon.

In the light, Spirit can lift his face to the warmth of the sunlight and fill his lungs with oxygen and push aware the knowledge of what has happened. He feels like gravity is barely holding him, as if he might lift off the ground if he doesn't focus on his steps. The weapon feels that he hasn't taken a proper breath in months, like he has forgotten how to inhale, and relearning the pattern of air and the motion of his lungs is soothing and fascinating and lets him forget everything else.

Darkness is the problem. He can avoid it all day, but the weight of the night presses down on him, croons to him with everything he has done, whispers that he has abandoned his meister and broken his heart, and Spirit's own shattered affection bleeds tears and he curls around himself and cries late into the night. He doesn't know when he'll be able to sleep properly again, if he will ever be able to sleep properly again. It is like his memories and his heart and his soul are all reaching out for the comfort of companionship, for the constant presence of the last five years, and there is nothing there no matter how far afield they range.

Spirit thought things would be better alone. Stein's instability was a constant threat, a perpetual terror that pressed the air from his lungs and left him panicked every moment. Leaving felt like an escape, like taking back the freedom he unknowingly traded at some distant time in exchange for his meister. But the change only makes things different, not better, and as the days pass the awareness of this lodges itself in the corner of Spirit's mind. He is free of his old fears, but he has done so by leaving a part of himself behind, and he is never going to be quite whole again on his own. Spirit was always the strong one with Stein, holding them both together and sane and stable through determination and sheer force of will, but he left his strength behind with Stein. Spirit doesn't know how to be strong for himself.


	25. The Scientist

**The Scientist by Coldplay**

It is raining when Stein finds his way to Spirit's front door. For once the weather matches his mood, catching his emotions as if to demonstrate the empathy he's never quite been able to master or fake, painting his hair flat and dripping against his skull and chilling the too-human warmth out of his blood. It is easier cold, easier with the uncovered scars on his cheek and on his arms catching the water in unnatural curves against his skin and his body shivering and acting on the autopilot of predetermined decision rather than the unpredictable flush of passion.

Spirit opens the door after Stein's first knock, a handful of slow heartbeats enough time for him to pull himself down the narrow hallway Stein can see behind him but not enough for him to hide behind the assumed formality of his usual suit jacket and tie. His shirt is loose, the collar unbuttoned over a triangle of pale skin that draws Stein's eyes for just a moment before they assume their usual fixation on the weapon's hair.

"Stein." The hallway is dim but there is a pool of warm yellow light spreading out from the living room at Spirit's back, dropping the older man into a halo that makes Stein flicker-smile, just for a moment, because everything today is exactly as poetic as he could wish and would have been entirely lost on him any other day, some day when his interiority was drowned out by logic and his feelings weren't pulsing through him in place of his blood.

"Senpai," and the syllables are warm, curved and smooth on his tongue as if they were /meant/ to be there, and something else has come through his voice because Spirit rocks backward, his weight unconsciously flinching from the unfamiliarity of the situation. His eyes are blue like the rain-hidden sky, the angle of his hesitant arm on the edge of the doorway is geometry so perfect Stein can never imitate it even in his memory, the flutter of a swallow in his exposed throat is captivating like the pulse that Stein can't even imagine that he sees, not at the distance he is at.

Stein tries to push his hands into the protection of pockets he doesn't have, lets them drop to his sides as they fail to make contact with anything but the dripping air. He can't find the words, now, now that he is here and everything is perfect and the world is demanding a perfect explanation that he doesn't have. He cannot explain the importance of the rare silence in his head at the moment, the lingering purr of Spirit's voice and the memory of Spirit's hair that have clung to his ears and his eyes until he can neither see nor hear anything but his lost weapon. He can't say that anything went /wrong/, that there was ever any /mistake/, because everything in his life feels like it has led to this one moment, with the water trickling against his neck and Spirit silhouetted in his doorway and the emotion thrumming in his veins illuminating the world in understanding that he has lacked in every breath of his life until now.

"What do you want, Stein?" Spirit finally asks, and there is nothing but honest curiosity in his voice, confusion and worry and Stein has never understood how is it that Spirit isn't afraid of him, how can the weapon look at the darkness behind his eyes and the half-healed tears in his skin and not run, not leave him to his demons and his Madness and the cold comfort of reason and logic and experimentation.

The words spill up his throat like water up a straw until they drip across his tongue and form themselves into sound. "I love you."

The syllables are odd, foreign for all that he's heard dozens of other people speak them to others, never to him. It feels like he is unlocking a corner of his brain that has lain dormant, that has cooled into hibernation while the rest of him operated with military efficiency and utter distance. And then there is more to say, more words that he has purchased with the first, his vocabulary expanding as rapidly as a child's. "I need you, senpai. Spirit." Respect and affection and desire all blending too fast to distinguish, names crashing together too fast to chose just one. "Come back. Work with me. Live with me. /Be/ with me."

Spirit steps back, actively shifting his far foot back down the hallway, and Stein feels a flood of panic for the first time in his life and then he is choking on the words that wouldn't come before, half-finishing sentences before the next overtakes them and wipes out the meaning, patterning into a rushing overlap like his thoughts when he is in the grip of Madness.

"I /need/ - I've been so alone - I'm sorry - you are /perfect/ and I'm - sorry, so sorry - don't leave - come back, come back, come - senpai, I - /Spirit/."

There is something in Spirit's eyes that Stein has never seen before, that Stein doesn't know how to read and doesn't understand, but the weapon hasn't moved and he hasn't shut the door, and Stein can't speak, can't think and can't move until Spirit does, and finally he just repeats himself because that seems to say everything, somehow.

"I love you." Just that, as if the words that went between this and his first words have explained anything at all, as if indecision wasn't scudding across Spirit's face like clouds.

Blue eyes flicker away from Stein's face, trying to read something from his body that Stein doesn't know how to say. Spirit's bottom lip comes up between his teeth, as unconscious as that first rock backward, and his expression gels into resolve and Stein's stomach drops to his feet.

Spirit steps sideways, out of the illumination, and even the indirect light makes Stein blink hard against the increased glow.

"Come in," Spirit's voice invites, and Stein brings a hand to his face, old habits covering his shut eyes and stuttering breath of relief before he tips his face up to Spirit and steps up to the light.


	26. Strange and Beautiful

**Strange and Beautiful by Aqualung**

Stein doesn't know how much Spirit notices. The weapon is a perplexing combination of terrifying intuitive and impressively dim, and Stein has no idea which of the two applies to his own behavior towards the older boy. It doesn't matter anyway. The meister has tried to stop and failed every time, tried to think about, look at, focus on anything other than the other boy when Spirit is in the room. He can't. Spirit draws his eyes and his attention unavoidably to himself, as though the entire world revolves around him and Stein can feel his gravitational force when they are too close.

It is the paradoxes in the weapon, he thinks first. The boy's current determination and the promise of stunning strength come in the same form that can dissolve into tears or laughter within seconds and for no discernible reason. Then he thinks it is the weapon's sheer beauty, his absurdly blue eyes and his sharp jawline and his hair (his hair, every time, the color of fire and blood and Stein can't ever look away) and the unthinking grace in the set of his shoulders and the pattern of his movements. But it's not that either, it's something of both and neither all tangled up together, and Stein has never been good with feelings and this is too much (he thinks) for anyone to pull apart.

He's not sure if the others make it better or worse. Spirit doesn't see it; he slips through his life and takes it for granted, as if the lingering gazes of others were part of his skin and just as disregarded. Stein is invisible in his wake, just the pale meister partnered with the glorious flame that is Spirit Albarn, and anyone who notices him does so with a brief flicker of jealousy and nothing more. He doesn't want the attention himself, and sometimes it is a relief to know that he is not alone, that Spirit has this crippling effect on others as well. But Stein doesn't take (has never taken) much pleasure from the sympathy or the company of others, and more often he wants to pull his partner away so he can enjoy his indefinable beauty in peace.

Stein can feel their connection weakening after Kami enters Spirit's life. He knows down in his soul, more thoroughly than he knows even his own Madness, that he and Spirit are more perfectly suited than any other partners at the Academy. Spirit's bleeding empathy, his own sociopathic distance, Spirit's charm and extraversion and his offputting interiority make for a convenient set of opposites, but ultimately they both need an outside hand in their lives. What Stein does to forge Spirit into the death scythe he will eventually be Spirit repays by holding Stein back from the madness in his blood that will consume him if he lets it. Stein doesn't know who else would or could do that for him, and he knows for certain that Spirit will never be as good a weapon as he will be with Stein. But he also knows that Kami has an allure that Spirit can't resist, that the longer she is around the further the weapon drifts from Stein himself, and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it but wait for the inevitable (he hopes, he can't let himself not hope) collapse of their romance.

All this is rattling the bars in his head when he comes home to find Spirit asleep on the couch. The weapon is sprawled out across the whole length of the sofa, one arm thrown up and over the back of the seat, one leg draped off the edge, head on the far arm so his extended foot hangs off the slightly-too short furniture. It is easy for Stein to drop his coat and his bag by the door, to slide off his shoes so he can pad almost silently to the far side of the sofa, to fold himself to the floor so he can just watch Spirit undisturbed.

The weapon is half-smiling in his sleep. Stein lets himself imagine for a moment that the older boy is dreaming of him in the ever-honest world of his subconscious. That outrageously red hair is tangled around the other boy's face, a few strands caught on Spirit's eyelashes and sticking to his lips. He is so relaxed in his sleep; all his limbs are draped bonelessly against the framework of the couch, and Stein is sure that even in his deepest dreams he is nothing like as unguarded as Spirit is right now.

The meister comes up onto his knees and leans in towards his weapon. His heart is racing with adrenaline at their proximity; as he draws closer he can feel Spirit's exhaled breath against his skin, hot and humid and intensely intimate. He is sure his heartbeat will wake the other boy, that his own breathing will startle him into alertness, but Spirit doesn't move, doesn't shift, and his utter stillness gives Stein the momentary courage to close the distance between them and press his lips against Spirit's sleeping smile.

The weapon stirs at the contact, and only all Stein's self-control keeps him from jerking backward and dragging the other boy into consciousness with him. He carefully extricates himself from his dangerous closeness, breaking the half-kiss and slipping back out of Spirit's personal space until he has replaced himself on the floor.

Spirit stretches before he opens his eyes, arching his back in a way that would make Stein's mouth go dry if the meister weren't already petrified with nerves. Then he blinks himself awake, his eyes drift into focus on Stein's face, and his unconscious smile turns into a conscious one.

"Hi." His voice is soft with sleep and dreams and Stein lets himself believe (just for this one moment) that there is another cause for the tenderness in his weapon's tone. It is all (along with his patience) that he has for now.


	27. Barricade

**Barricade by Stars**

Spirit gave up on his heart the day he met Stein. Everything in the meister's cold green eyes - the emotionless distance, the promise of restrained violence, the sociopathic calculation - was like an irresistible drug to the older boy. Spirit never stood a chance against it, knew himself to be lost the moment he saw the stiff set of Stein's shoulders from across the room. Those eyes were beautiful and cold and terrible, and everything in Spirit reformed itself to fit their demands before Stein ever had to ask.

Stein never knew. Over the years of the their partnership, when his need for pointless destruction was breaking Spirit's heart and stealing his breath, the meister never turned to see the pained desire in Spirit's face while the weapon watched him. He couldn't fight it any more than he could have walked away that first day; something in Stein begged to be fixed, to be loved, to be healed, and even when he couldn't succeed at the healing he couldn't stop himself from the futile effort.

There was a beauty in the clinical removal of the meister, an elegance to the precision of his attacks in battle and to the uncaring bluntness of his behavior outside of it. When Stein finally started to *feel* and his distance started to crumble, Spirit knew. Stein did his best to hide it, but the shift in the meister's behavior from reality to facade was perfectly clear to the weapon who had been watching him for years. Spirit never told him that he knew. He couldn't. Telling Stein how he had been feeling, how he did feel, would only have torn their relationship apart faster. Instead he feigned ignorance he didn't feel, feigned blindness he didn't have and let the slow unravelling of their partnership follow to its inevitable conclusion.

There was no way to stop it. Spirit could handle the sociopathy, could handle the madness, could handle the violence and ask for more, but there was no way that Stein could ever handle his own feelings once they started to show themselves. Affection was far more devastating to the meister's composure than anything Spirit or any enemy could do; once he started reciprocating Spirit's feelings, even unknowingly, the end was only a matter of time. And Spirit cared too much, perhaps had too much masochism in him, to try to hold on when the meister finally left in an attempt to save himself by retreating into his isolation.

It was a long, long wait until Stein came back to him. Spirit was never very good at patience, but this didn't involve patience so much as faith, and he had more than enough of that in Stein. When the meister finally returned, Spirit almost didn't recognize him. The hair was the same, the clothing near-identical, the features just shifted into a more adult alignment, but the expression in his grey-green eyes was all different. There was a warmth there when he looked at Spirit that had never been there before, a hint of empathy learned in the years apart. Spirit found himself wondering if Stein had even known what he was missing before, what he had paid to maintain the distance that he had clung to for so long.

When the meister came to find him, Spirit was ready to be taken back.


	28. Breathing

**Breathing by Lifehouse**

The voices are finally starting to go quiet.

Stein has no idea how many hours, days, weeks it has been. He can tell when the murmurs in his head are rising into the foreground and can offer minimal warning to his partner, but for the worst of the episode he has no recollection of his surroundings. Sometimes he has come back into himself and hasn't moved for four days; other times he is only out for a few hours, but he returns with unidentified blood dried in the creases of his fingers and unexplained aches or bruises scattered over his body. That only happened twice before Spirit took to locking the front door of the laboratory when the Madness began to rise and began to stay close enough to hand to stop Stein if he tries to leave. Now even if he is mobile and communicative Spirit is the only one to see, and while the weapon hasn't told Stein what he says or does he hasn't left yet either, and that's enough for now.

"Stein." The meister has no idea if that is a flicker in his miswired brain or if his partner is actually just over his shoulder. He doesn't open his eyes or turn around. It is better for him to let reality seep back into his awareness rather than drag full distinctions in too early; otherwise paranoia starts to cloud his perceptions and it takes him days longer to come fully back into mostly-stability.

"Hi senpai," he says aloud, just in case the weapon *is* standing in the doorway behind him. It doesn't really matter. The words in his head that sometimes steal Spirit's voice have in the past been indistinguishable from the older boy's actual interactions. Once Stein told Spirit about a verified hallucination of the weapon's advice, and Spirit had laughed with surprisingly lightness and said, "Sounds just like me." Stein likes to imagine that his head has cordoned off the space that Spirit occupies, so memories of the other boy can inform his mental storytelling without the corruption of his own insanity leeching in. Spirit is and always has been Stein's voice of reason, even when that voice is itself an invention of a fevered mind.

"How are you feeling?" There is a heavy undertone of concern that would be irritating if the speaker were anyone other than Spirit himself. Given the circumstances, it actually wins a rare smile from Stein.

"I've been better, but not particularly recently." He sighs. His skin feels cold and clammy with sweat from his lost memories, and when he shifts drying salt catches against the fabric of his clothes. "How long was I out?"

"A couple days."

"Did I do anything?"

"Not this time. You did start screaming in the middle of the night yesterday - thanks for that -" the voice is very gently teasing now, "But otherwise you were a model patient." The sound of footsteps, the brush of fingers against Stein's forehead in a gesture that is part concerned nurse and part affectionate partner. The meister keeps his eyes carefully shut. If this is still a hallucination he doesn't want to cut it off now, not when he can feel the warm texture of Spirit's skin against the stickiness of his forehead and can hear the weapon's breathing just over him.

"I'm glad you're back." Stein isn't sure he's meant to hear that, but it twists a smile out of him anyway.

The touch vanishes, the footsteps start to move away.

"Senpai." The syllables interrupt the scuff of bare feet against the floor. "Are you really here?"

That is the sound of a laugh interrupting the pattern of inhale-exhales. "You ask me every time, Stein. It's always me."

That's not entirely an answer, but Stein doesn't want to try to explain to the real Spirit that the copy of the weapon he carries in his head would say the same thing, so he just lets the sound of the older boy's movement vanish down the hallway and waits until the last echoes have died away before he opens his eyes to his surroundings and pulls himself to his feet. He follows the path traced by the lost footsteps to just outside Spirit's own room, leans around the frame for a moment to reassure himself that the other boy is within, facing his desk with his back to the open door. The weapon's hair is hanging over his face and across the back of his neck, and Stein's best hallucinations haven't quite been able to match that shade of red from his memories, so the meister steps back around the corner satisfied that this really is his partner.

He is a little shaky on his feet and he can't quite recall how to work his body comfortably, so he shifts to sit with his back to the outside wall of Spirit's room and waits for his breathing to slow until it no longer distracts his sense of sound. First he hears the sound of Spirit's bare feet absently tapping against the floor and the bottom rung of the chair. As his mind steadies and quiets he can hear the whispering glide of paper against itself when the older boy turns a page in whatever he is reading. Finally he separates out the slightly uneven sound of Spirit's breathing from the other ambient sounds. The weapon sucks in air quickly, exhales slowly like a pleased sigh. Sometimes his breath out is huffed into sections in the tiniest evidence of a laugh at something he is reading, or his inhale is delayed while he rushes through a tense paragraph, but the sound is mindlessly rhythmic on the whole, soothing white noise that reminds Stein that he shares air with the older boy, that he can breathe in the weapon's sanity and mental stability with every inhale. Above all it is absolute proof that the older boy exists, that he continues to live in the same world, in the same home Stein does, that he is more than a figment of the meister's overly vivid imagination. Stein's hallucinations never breathe; he doesn't know why this should be the case, but whatever else his mind can conjure up it cannot produce the convincing pattern of another person's respiration.

"Stein." That is Spirit's voice over him. Stein blinks, tips his head back against the wall so he can look up at his weapon.

Spirit is leaning in the doorway to his room in an impressive attempt at nonchalance. His crossed arms and angled center of mass do well to support his facade, but his eyes entirely undermine it with the tightness at their corners and the flushed concern in the blue.

"Senpai." This is starting to feel like deja vu, but Spirit's next words break the illusion.

"Do you want to come inside?" Spirit tips his head towards the inside of his room. "You don't need to wait out in the hallway, you know. I don't mind the company."

Stein wants to smile but doesn't. He can't explain to Spirit that the curve of the weapon's hair against the back of his neck and the angle of his eyelashes and the casual shift of his body while he is reading are all impossibly, painfully distracting, that it all adds up to too much at one time and that right now all he wants is the tiny trickle of sensation that his ears grant with the weapon in the other room.

Instead he shakes his head, one turn on each side while keeping his eyes fixed on Spirit's so he can keep watching the concern there. "No, I'm fine." There is a pause and Spirit shows no signs of moving. Stein forces what he hopes is a comforting smile onto his face. "Thanks, senpai."

Spirit sighs in resignation and turns to go back into the room. Stein lets his eyes shut and waits for the sounds of movement to fade from the other room so he can let his weapon's breathing echo into his cooling brain and ease away the fading purr of the other voices in his head.


	29. My Skin

**My Skin by Natalie Merchant**

Stein hears Spirit coming well before the weapon enters the room. The meister has his eyes shut and is leaning against the wall so he doesn't have to support the growing weight of his own body. With his eyes shut and coldness creeping over his skin, his ears are the most responsive of his senses, and he hears the pattern of footsteps and the rhythm of breath that he identifies as his partner in plenty of time.

"Stein?" There is a faint glow of light from the hallway when Spirit opens the door; even behind closed eyes Stein can see the increase in illumination.

"Don't turn on the light," he orders. There is a pause, but Stein knows that Spirit will obey even while the weapon thinks he is deciding what to do, and after a moment the older boy steps into the room and lets the door fall shut behind him.

"Are you okay?" Spirit asks. Stein opens his eyes but the limited light gives him just the faintest outline of Spirit's form, the rough shading of dark hair and pale skin.

"Come here," the meister doesn't answer, and after another pointless hesitation Spirit steps in with the careful steps of the near-blind, lowers himself to his knees close enough that Stein could reach out and touch him if he wanted.

He doesn't. There is an impossible chasm between him and the weapon; Spirit doesn't seem to realize it's there, but Stein is painfully aware of its existence and his inability to step over it. Instead he shuts his eyes again - even the obscured lines of Spirit's face are too much at the moment - and starts to speak.

"Do you remember our first fight?"

"What?" Spirit has a habit of starting all his responses with a question. Stein has become endeared to it over the years; this time he is expecting it, smiling before Spirit has finished enunciating the word. "Yeah, sure. I distinctly recall me almost tripping you before we figured out our balance." His voice is full of barely-repressed laughter. The amusement catches and holds Stein's fading smile while he listens. "And me getting sick when I ate the soul afterward. It's really amazing we didn't die those first few assignments."

Stein's memory reels out beyond the combat, to the touch of Spirit's hand on his shoulder after, the half-hidden pleasure in the weapon's eyes, the long night in their hotel room pretending that the occasional contact across a shared bed was entirely casual instead of crackling with electricity. The elaborately tentative brush of fingers against arm, shoulder, neck, the almost-caught glances of green eyes and blue both, the weight of stares and half-seen smiles and unspoken desire in the following months. In the dark it is easier to call these up, to tell himself that these were not a dream, that the recent distance of his partner is the exception and not the rule.

"Stein?" Spirit's voice is very carefully steady. The lie of his calm speaks more to his concern than anything else could do. "What's wrong?"

Stein exhales slowly and doesn't answer. His arms are very heavy, his head is an impossible weight. Hearing is the only thing that isn't exhausting, so he listens to the nervous speed of Spirit's breathing in the dark as his strength ebbs away and lethargy seeps into its place.

"Stein." The voice is closer now, the breathing warm against his skin. Stein drags his eyelids open. This close he can make out the shadowed details of Spirit's face, the dark pools of his eyes, the grey curve of his mouth, the stark outline of his hair against his skin. When Stein opens his eyes, Spirit leans in over the impossible distance between them and presses the heat of his lips against the edge of Stein's mouth. The angle is all wrong for reciprocation, so Stein shuts his eyes again and sighs against Spirit's skin while the weapon's mouth fits itself to the shape of Stein's.

Spirit pulls back a fraction. "You're freezing." His hands come up to press against Stein's throat, his wrists, and Stein lets his head shift to the side to expose his neck to the weapon and lets the warmth of Spirit's skin bleed into his for the moment before realization hits his partner. The weapon's hands come away damp with blood from the cuts along Stein's arms, shoulders, face.

"Oh my god, Stein." There is real panic now, edging up the register into high octaves of fear. Stein wishes that it wouldn't, that he could just stay in the dark and the heaviness of blood loss with the dim flush of Spirit's shared heat on his skin and the texture of Spirit's mouth on his.

But the light and Spirit are calling, and to have one he must have the other, so Stein surrenders to the demands of consciousness.


	30. How to Save a Life

**How to Save a Life by the Fray**

Stein doesn't look up when Spirit stands in the doorway of his room, doesn't respond to a half-hearted tap on the open door or ostentatious throat-clearing. After several long seconds of awkwardness, Spirit drops the pretense of subtlety and starts talking.

"Hey there, Stein."

"I'm listening," the meister cuts him off almost before he's done speaking. Spirit half-swallows his words and tries to curb the flare of frustration that bubbles up in him. Irritation is what he's been feeling more than anything with the other boy recently, irritation and hurt feelings and too-quick anger all tangled together, but that's not why he's here. He wants to have a conversation, not pick a fight, so he swallows the frustration and tells himself to stay calm.

"Can we just -" There's no word sufficient for what he wants to express. "- Talk? For a minute?"

Stein leans back in his chair and shuts the book in front of him with a thud. He pushes his chair so it spins slowly to face Spirit and tips his head up to stare at the weapon. He is looking in the older boy's direction but his eyes are focused on something far behind Spirit. It's just as frustrating as his initial reaction but Spirit is determined to maintain his calm in spite of it.

He forces a smile but Stein doesn't react. Spirit's not even sure that the meister is looking at him or listening to a thing he says, but this is exactly the problem and there doesn't seem to be any way to fix this other than attempting to force the issue.

"Look, Stein." Spirit looks away from that blank expression as he tries to keep his voice steady. "I don't know what's going on. I'm not even sure what happened in the first place, but everything is all wrong now and it has been for too long and I don't know how to fix it. What happened? What can I do? Please just - tell me how I can help you."

Stein blinks at Spirit but doesn't speak. Spirit can tell from the tightness in his jaw that the meister is holding back and from the distance in his expression that he's not going to crack through on his own. He has to try, though.

"Please, Stein." Calmness is wearing thin, rising into the tension of hurt as Spirit keeps talking. "Just *tell* me. Anything is better than this silent treatment when I don't even know what *happened*."

Stein shifts and for a moment Spirit thinks he may have won this battle. Then the meister raises his hand to shift his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and when he tips his head back up the reflection of the light in the room entirely obscures the green in his eyes.

"Nothing *happened*, Spirit." Stein's voice is flat as it always is, but in the moment the lack of inflection is painful to hear. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"How can you *not*?" Spirit keeps his hands carefully folded in front of him so he won't be tempted to do anything more confrontational than talk. "You used to *talk* to me. We used to be *friends*. We used to be *partners,* properly, and then you started avoiding me and we stopped talking and I have no idea what happened to cause it."

Stein sighs. "You're overthinking things. Nothing has changed."

Spirit can't see Stein's eyes but he can see the stress in the other boy's face and the darkening shadows under his eyes. They've been expanding for days, weeks, until they are a permanent fixture on Stein's face and a constant proof of the other boy's sleeplessness. Spirit stayed up all night once, waiting outside the other boy's room and listening to the faint sounds of activity from inside, but he wasn't able to get up the nerve to actually open the door and as far as he knows Stein has no idea he was there. If sleep deprivation could fix whatever has broken between them, Spirit would happily forgo whatever rest he needed, but of course it won't and without more information Spirit doesn't even know where to look to solve this.

He can't move forward as things are. Spirit sighs in echo of Stein and finds his focus again, once more, one last time. "*Please* tell me, Stein."

There is a long, long pause, Spirit gazing at the white shine off glass and Stein at least angling his head towards Spirit. After the hesitation has grown so long that Spirit knows the answer already, knows it without being told, Stein half-shakes his head, a minimal movement left-right, and speaks.

"No."

At least it is an answer. At least there is the admission that *something* did happen, that it is not all in Spirit's mind. That should be some comfort but it is minimal at best in the face of the cold resignation that sweeps over the weapon. Spirit can feel his shoulders sag, feel the fight and the desperation leave him on a single exhale.

"Okay."

As Spirit turns to leave, the reflection slips off Stein's glasses and he catches a last glimpse of the look in the meister's green eyes. They are shining with the salty liquid of tears, the color almost glowing unhealthily over the purple of sleeplessness. Stein looks awful, like he's on the verge of utter collapse, like the only thing keeping him upright is sheer force of will.

Spirit dreams of that expression for years, wakes up gasping for air from nightmares of it, convinced that Stein is actually gone and that it is all his fault, that if he had done more or tried harder the meister would have told him the truth in that moment. He knows it isn't true when he awakes, knows rationally that he did all he could and more than he should have, but it isn't until Stein come back to him, years and years in the unforeseen future, that he is able to sleep through the night again.


	31. All the Right Moves

**All the Right Moves by OneRepublic**

They are an amazing team. Spirit knows this with a certainty that cuts right past the polite self-deprecation of ordinary conversation and his own innate modesty. He and Stein are fantastically matched, two of the best students in the entire Academy, head-and-shoulders above their classmates and still with years of potential to meet and exceed.

They just won't be reaching that potential together.

Spirit is great for Stein. Spirit holds the meister down, tethers him to sanity and gives him a reason to exert himself towards normalcy. Spirit reminds Stein to feel. In exchange Stein teaches Spirit how to be a weapon, how to cut through opponents without getting weighed down by the constant horror of killing. Stein reminds Spirit that they are fighting against monsters, that there is a time and a place for feelings and the battlefield is not it. Stein leads Spirit through combat, Spirit maneuvers Stein through humanity.

They are a perfect team, and because of that Stein will never make Spirit a Death Weapon. Spirit is sure Stein doesn't know that, at least not yet. He is still throwing himself into fights with all the icy pleasure of a true sadist with no thought for the final result. But they have been slower and slower in completing assignments and Spirit knows that Stein will not, cannot give up their relationship, even for the worthy goal of completing a Death Weapon. And if Stein doesn't have this realization until the middle of the final fight with a witch, just coming out alive will be a very real accomplishment.

Spirit has to leave. Stein won't, can't, wouldn't even if he knew what Spirit knows, and Lord Death will never demand that they change partners, even though he must see it too, perhaps has seen it from the first day they met. But the weapon can't go, not yet. He is counting the souls they collect and praying for longer delays between assignments but eventually a new request always comes in and they can't plausibly refuse, not when they are the rising star of the Academy. When the darkness curls over them at night Spirit stretches sideways, rests his head against Stein's chest so he can hear the meister's heart beating in time with his like a countdown to the inevitable separation. Stein knows something is wrong - he can't miss the moisture of tears against his bare skin - but he never says anything, never asks. That is easier. It is better for Spirit to hold the knowledge to himself while savoring the tug of Stein's fingers sowing comfort across his scalp and through his hair. He can't form the words, can't adopt the cool tone Stein takes for truly critical information to convey this suspicion-turned-surety to the meister. All he can do is shut his eyes and soak in the present and tell himself that this won't be everything, that he won't let this be everything, that someday the clouds over their future will clear and they will find each other again.


	32. Prodigal

**Prodigal by OneRepublic**

Spirit has always known that he is weak.

He is a great weapon, he has amazing potential, everyone says this, everyone is hopeful for his future, and he has never been strong enough even to tell them they are wrong. He can't push against the opinions of others, can't stand up for himself or for anyone else, can't hold his own in even a verbal fight. His weakness makes him afraid, and it is fear that finally pushes him away from Stein.

Stein is strong. Stein knows who he is and knows how he feels towards Spirit, knows so deep in his soul that Spirit can feel it when they Resonate. And Stein believes in Spirit, believes in the weapon's innate strength in a way that terrifies the weapon. He can't live up to Stein's expectations. He can't be worthy of Stein's love, that deeper current of shattering devotion underneath the faith the meister has in him. Stein doesn't care about anyone, Stein has never loved anyone, but he cares about Spirit and he loves Spirit, casually and intensely so every time they come out of Resonance Spirit transforms into his human form with cheeks damp with tears of panic and self-doubt.

Even then Stein is there, stroking comfort into his hair and across the back of his neck, silent acceptance even though there is no way he can know what is filtering through Spirit's head. The quiet hangs heavy with trust, even with no explanation, even with no understanding, and that just makes everything worse.

It is not the distance that pushes Spirit away; Stein is never distant with him, only quiet when he needs to be. It is not fear of his meister, because Spirit has never truly been scared of the younger boy, not when he *knows* Stein would do anything at all for him. It is his own self that he runs from, the weight of his promised "potential" that everyone but himself can see. He can't bear to see Stein's green eyes go warm when the meister looks at him, can't stand the faith he can feel in Stein's soul when they fight. Stein respects him with something that is part love and part worship and part trust, and Spirit is terrified of letting his meister down. There is no way the him that he knows can live up to those expectations. He *will* disappoint the meister, it is only a matter of time, and Spirit can't bear the thought of seeing coldness when Stein looks at him.

He knows leaving is itself a betrayal. He feels like he is abandoning Stein, running from him instead of supporting him, but when he leaves Spirit is the one who cries and not Stein. Stein just watches him, listens to his tearful explanations, and his expression doesn't flicker even once.

"Don't wait," Spirit tells him, "Don't wait, I'll never be as good as you think I am, I'm not *worth* it, Stein," but the meister doesn't blink at that either, and Spirit doesn't know whether he wants to laugh or sob because this is the one thing he will ask that Stein will never do. Spirit's not sure the meister *can* let him go even if he wanted to, even if he brought all his will to bear on the subject, and Stein isn't going to try, that much is obvious from his lack of reaction to Spirit's plea.

Spirit doesn't know if he will ever come back. The romantic part of his head, the part that believes in eternal love and happy-ever-after and soulmates, says that Spirit will find his strength and when he comes back Stein will be waiting for him just like he always has. But he can't lie to himself all the time, and the pressure of a meister waiting for him to return is just as crippling in its way as actually *being* with Stein, so Spirit buries those thoughts under the weight of cynicism that he labels realism and pretends that the thought of Stein doesn't linger over his every action, his every word, his every breath.

There are still only buried, though, and when his defenses are lowered by exhaustion or alcohol he *knows* with the same unshakeable faith Stein has in him that the meister will wait for him, is waiting for him, that he will always have a place to return to when he's ready. And after all, it is hard to argue with the existence of soulmates when he's met his already.


	33. Clarity

**Clarity by Zedd feat. Foxes (Acoustic)**

There is nothing Stein can do when the Madness comes.

He can see it coming like a wave on the horizon, sometimes days or hours in advance, but all his attempts to brace himself do no good against the weight of his own insanity. There is something missing in him, some step of logic or some emotional safety valve that he doesn't have, that keeps the purr of madness rumbling in the back of his head no matter what he does to try to overthrow it and that keeps him lost in it once it hits.

The only way to climb back to reason and sanity is through Spirit, and Stein wishes more than anything that that wasn't true. When Spirit touches him, when Spirit speaks, when Spirit breathes, the weapon carries sanity with him, brushes away the perpetual fog from Stein's thoughts as if it was never there at all. Stein imagines that he can feel what it is like to be perfectly normal, perfectly sane, while Spirit is there. The problem is that it *is* Spirit, that when Stein blinks hallucination from his eyes the first thing he always sees is the pain on Spirit's face.

It would be easier if it were someone else, anyone else. It would be easier if Spirit didn't love him, if Stein could persuade the weapon to pin his affections on someone less broken and less shattered. It would be easier if *Stein* didn't love *Spirit*, if he could look at the weapon with the distant coldness that he usually applies to other people. But the three pieces are all tangled up, Stein suspects inextricably; he loves Spirit as himself, as the part of himself that is somehow missing and trapped in the form of another person, and Spirit loves him because the weapon loves easily and irrationally and because Stein needs him, and Stein doesn't have the words or the logic or the strength to push him away, although it would be better. Easier.

He tried to leave, once. After the first few times it happened, when Stein started to wake from nightmares that were less about losing himself and more about losing Spirit, he tried to go, to pull away and separate them before he stopped being able to tell where the line lay. It was the worst episode of his life, even though he remembers almost none of it; the panic was the worse for being vague, the fright and misery so strong he was tasting and seeing emotion instead of reality, and when he came back to himself Spirit's arms were around his shoulders and the weapon's fingers were tangled into his hair and the older boy was sobbing incoherent pleas that didn't stop until Stein managed to get his arms up in echo of the weapon's. Even that wasn't the worst; the worst was after, when Spirit had collapsed into emotionally drained sleep and Stein had found the bloody tracks of scratches along the weapon's arms and shoulders and the dried red across his own palms.

The realization of what he had done, the possibilities of what /could/ have happened, were enough to fill Stein with a nauseated horror he has never felt before or after. After that there were no more opportunities, no more choices, because Stein can't chose to hurt Spirit voluntarily, regardless of the cost to himself, and Spirit won't let him leave. He takes the pain of recollection on himself, instead, lets Spirit bring him back to sanity even though knowing he's caused Spirit's expression tears at him like claws, lets Spirit love him and inhales that love with the breaths he takes against the other boy's skin because it's the only way he can hold himself in one piece.


	34. Just Like a Pill

**Jut Like a Pill by P!nk**

Stein has never noticed how cold the floor of the laboratory is before. He's never had cause to notice before he collapsed onto it like a boneless doll. Right now it feels like some living thing sapping the warmth from his body and the pulse from his heart and he lacks the strength to push himself away from the invading ice. He briefly considers calling for help, forcing his vocal chords into the shape of a plea, before he remembers that there is no one to hear.

The awareness hits him like a punch and he has to consciously force his body into the pattern of breathing, distract himself with conscious inhale-exhale for several seconds until it becomes ordinary again and the choking pressure of sobs fades from his throat enough to allow him air. He hasn't had to remember to breathe on his own for so long; it has been easier to just follow Spirit, to breathe with the weapon's unique pattern, to let his body's rhythms and instincts rearrange themselves around the other boy. The possibility that this technique might fail him didn't cross his mind at the time. It still seems almost impossible now, that Spirit is actually gone, that he is alone again for the first time in years, but when his breathing stalls again the echoing silence of the laboratory is proof that even this most impossible of things can and has happened.

There is a part of Stein that is untouched by Spirit's influence, a dark purr that Stein has locked down and pushed away, that Stein has done everything in his power to avoid in the interests of maintaining sanity and keeping his partner close. In the silence the purr is growing to a roar for lack of conflict, and Stein does not have the mental strength to fight it back. Not now. Not when there is no point anymore.

He shuts his eyes - it's not like there is anything to look at from his angle anyway - and gives over, lets the darkness free from its restraints and lets the madness bleed into his veins like poison. The bright part of him, the part that is tightening his throat and forgetting how to breathe and screaming in his head, that part relaxes into its own misery, sinks under the water of pain, and lets pure hallucination offer what comfort it can.

His mind can call up a perfect image of Spirit's smile, the faint upturn at the corners of his lips or the shine of a proper grin. The color of Spirit's eyes is harder, an oddly bright blue that's not quite the sky and not quite the ocean but somehow unique to the weapon himself, and the softness that is sometimes there when he looks at Stein is very hard to recall. Stein lets himself struggle with it until he succeeds, the pleasure of the darkness granting him patience even as it gives back the strength his anguish has stolen. Then it is on to the smaller things, the weapon's narrow wrists, his sharp collarbones, the ripple of his shoulders when he stretches, muscle drawing tight across the bones underneath. The pattern of thread across a Kishin-inflicted injury, trapping the warm blood back under his skin where it belongs. The sigh of Spirit's breath when he lies down, the smell of his clothes when he goes past, the salt-sweet of his skin on the rare occasions Stein has reason to catch it on his lips or tongue.

By the time he thinks of Spirit's hair, the darkness has liberated his muscles and bones and is ready to push him to his feet. He stands as the color fills his head, the fainter sensations of strands across his palms vanishing under the strength of the visual impression. This is not like his eyes. Spirit's hair is /red/, red exactly like blood is red. The impression is so strong that when Stein does open his eyes, the grey of the world around him is startling and for a moment he thinks he has lost his sense of color. When he looks at his palms, his skin, that looks grey too, pale and washed-out even though he knows there must be red underneath as well.

He starts out walking, calmly, slowly, as if his heart isn't skidding fast in his chest without the metronome of Spirit to pace it. By the time he reaches the front door he is almost jogging and when he clears the front gate he is all-out running, his feet matching themselves to his heart instead of the other way around. It has been years since he felt this way, years since he *let* himself feel this way. It has been years since this was the only way to coat his hands in red.

That's the last thing his bright side can offer before it is dimmed under the wave of past darkness. Stein starts to smile as he runs, towards the city, towards the forest, towards the lives that he can take and the skin that he can break. It doesn't reach his eyes.


	35. The Reason

**The Reason by Hoobastank**

Stein always assumed that Spirit knew. Even now, it is hard to remember that the weapon is separate from him, that Spirit isn't always plugged in directly to his innermost self, that he might not understand *why* Stein has done the things he has done.

Spirit holds his curiosity in for months, and that is different too. Many things have changed in their years apart, and not just the obvious shifts of appearance and changed status at the Academy and improved fighting skills. At some point the weapon learned how to hold his questions to himself, learned how to keep secrets, and Stein realizes this truth as soon as Spirit asks.

"I've been wondering," the other man says, his voice deceptively casual and forced into nonchalance so the pain of his recent injuries doesn't bleed into it at all. "Why did you do it?"

Stein has absolutely no idea what the weapon is talking about and says so. "What are you talking about, senpai?"

Spirit shifts uncomfortably, adjusting his bandaged arm and flinching. He has every right to be in pain but this is a stalling technique. Stein can see it clearly now that he's looking for it. Spirit doesn't look at the meister, just smiles with self-conscious awkwardness before he clarifies. "You - changed. You learned to interact with people. You made yourself likeable." Spirit glances over his shoulder at the cluster of standing Death Weapons behind them and lowers his voice so they won't overhear. "I think most people in this room like you more than they like me."

"You think I'm not likeable?" *Stein* is stalling now. He knows what Spirit is asking, but besides the surprise that the weapon didn't know he is feeling a surge of panic at putting the answer into words. And anyway it's worth it for the backpedal blush that starts at Spirit's collar and climbs to his hairline.

"No, of course *I* think you're likeable." Spirit can't even *look* at him now, and that suggests something more than Stein has let himself hope until this moment. "But you never bothered making friends before. Not when we were in school. Why did you start?"

Stein doesn't like to look away from Spirit when he has the chance to watch the weapon, especially when the older man is too nervous to look at him and therefore is unlikely to meet his gaze. But in order to organize his thoughts he pulls his eyes away, reaches to adjust his cigarette, tries to find the words to express himself.

It's easier than he tries to make it. He realizes that as soon as the right words enter his mind, starts speaking almost before they're fully formed.

"It was because of you, senpai."

They *are* the right words, but Spirit doesn't have the years of background from Stein's head necessary to understand them. "What?"

This is going to be hard to say, not because Stein wants to hide anything but because he's so unaccustomed to putting words to these things. It would be easier to take Spirit's hand and drop into Resonance for a moment, to let the weapon just *see* what he means, but that is the shortcut student Stein would take, and adult Stein recognizes this as a valuable struggle even as he sighs in frustration.

"You left," he starts, and that is the right thing, telling this like a story will be easiest. "You left and you took me with you. I didn't know how to exist without you."

Stein inhales a lungful of smoke and Spirit waits in unmoving silence, barely breathing at all until the meister speaks again. "You were right to leave. I hurt you. It was - very hard, without you." The pause holds weeks of pain, nights full of nightmares and days where it was hard to remember how to breathe. Stein's skin prickles with remembered injuries from days when the only thing he could feel at all was the pain in his head and in his heart and writing it on his skin was the only way he could keep from destroying himself. "But you were still out there somewhere. I had to become better for you. I didn't deserve you, before."

"Stein -" Spirit's voice cracks high and Stein talks over him.

"It was so *easy* with you that I never had to fix the things that were wrong. And without you - it gave me a reason to change." He inhales hard at the last of the cigarette, crushes it against the ground of the Death Room. "I had to be worth you when I got another chance."

When Stein looks at Spirit, the weapon's mouth is open and his eyes are glassy with moisture. Stein doesn't understand why he is crying. Another thing he has lost in the years between, another thing he can now relearn. He reaches out to touch Spirit's cheek just as the tears overflow, catches the first drops on his fingertips, smiles.

"Don't cry, senpai."

That doesn't help, of course, but even when Spirit looks away there is the memory of new softness in his gaze, and Stein shuts his eyes and lets the image lock into his mind so he can at least have that much, the promise of more, to sate his desire for now.


	36. Secrets

**Secrets by OneRepublic**

Spirit has never been very good at keeping secrets. He doesn't understand the basic premise; all the secrets he has ever had he eventually shared, and every time it has been for the worst that he kept them at all. He had tried very hard to be considerate of his meister's distance, though, because Stein *is* very good at keeping them, so good that Spirit has spent months not entirely sure the other boy is keeping *any* because it has been so hard to catch him out in the emotional tells that Spirit can't help but display. He has been watching though, and now he is sure, and he is tired of the distance and he is tired of the misinterpretation and, above all, Spirit is tired of the secrets.

It takes a long time for Stein to answer his door. The entry to the meister's room is more secure than the front door that protects them from the outside, but given Spirit's plans for tonight he is pretty sure a door is the least of his concerns, so when the first tentative knock goes unnoticed he knocks again, louder. And again. He is raising his hand for the fourth attempt when the sound of movement from inside the room stops him, and he has time to compose himself into the picture of patience before the meister cracks the door open.

Stein looks exhausted, as he usually does, the smudges under his eyes the same saturated darkness as the grey shirt he's wearing. His hair is even more unkempt than usual, tousled and tangled, and his green eyes are dull with sleep instead of razor-sharp as Spirit has come to expect. The knocking clearly dragged him out of bed. If Spirit weren't so set on his path, he would feel bad about this, but he committed himself as soon as he knocked the second time and there isn't space for guilt right now.

"What is it, Spirit?" Even Stein's voice is showing signs of his half-awake state, rasping in his throat with the lingering traces of drowsiness. Spirit has never seen his meister this tired or this vulnerable or this *human*, and if his pre-determined conviction didn't have him in its grip the novelty would pull the confession right out of him anyway.

"I like you." The words have been choking him, rising up in his throat all day, but now that he says them they seem to deflate and lose their meaning under Stein's confused expression. "I *really* like you." Stein is still staring at him, although confusion is fading into blank disbelief now. Spirit laughs, painfully self-conscious, and almost shuts his eyes to grant himself at least the illusion of isolation. But he started this, he's the one who wanted to have this conversation, and his rarely-used determination rises up and takes control of his body, smooths the tension from his shoulders, straightens his spine, brings his eyes back up to calmly meet the meister's, and takes over his tongue and mouth.

"Look, Stein, I'm crazy about you. I have been for months, maybe for years. I've been dreaming about you and thinking about you all the time and I tried to tell myself for a while that it was just hormones but it's not, it's *really* not, and I know you probably don't care but I didn't want to keep on talking to you everyday like I'm *not* thinking about kissing every scientific thought right out of your head and I assume this will make everything horribly awkward but I'm just so *tired* of pretending like my heart's not trying to pound it's way out of my chest every time I'm around you and this all just seemed so *stupid* so I thought I should just get all this out on the table." He comes to a halt. Stein's eyes are perfectly round; Spirit realizes belatedly that the meister's glasses are gone, probably taken off while he was sleeping, and with no reflection between them they are very very green against his pallid skin and silver hair.

"Fuck," Spirit enunciates carefully. "I'm going to kiss you, okay?"

He doesn't wait for a response before he steps in and reaches out to cup his hands carefully around Stein's sleep-tangled hair and brings his too-talkative mouth to rest against Stein's lips. The meister's mouth is barely parted in the same shocked expression he has been wearing, his lips are chapped against Spirit's, and he exhales in surprise into Spirit's mouth, and Spirit is lost, wandering through the taste of Stein against his lips and the faint warmth of the other boy's skin next to his and the silky-soft threads of grey on his palms.

Spirit keeps his lips slightly separated in imitation of Stein's - he's not interested in pressuring the other boy into more - but he does inhale against the meister's lips, breathing him into his lungs for the seconds that he has like this. When he releases the meister and steps back, he holds his last breath for a long moment, clinging to what he has stolen from the half-awake body of the other boy.

Stein hasn't shut his eyes, hasn't moved, hasn't responded at all, but he hasn't stepped away either, and for the first time there is the flicker of suspicion and of hope in Spirit's mind. The weapon tries on a shaky smile and Stein gusts an exhale like he's been inadvertently holding his breath as Spirit has deliberately done.

"So." Spirit's voice comes out high and trembling and he clears his throat carefully before going on. "That's...done."

"Uh. Yeah." Stein sounds as shaken as Spirit feels, which is some small consolation.

"Uh. You don't - I mean I know something's up with you, but you don't need to tell me. I just thought - this was - easier." Spirit pulls his hand through his hair, looks away - all his brief fortitude has evaporated - and looks back. "So. Yeah."

Stein swallows visibly and pulls the door open the rest of the way. Spirit gets a glimpse of a poorly-lit interior, piles of books and tangled sheets on a narrow bed, and then Stein steps in to close the gap between them and he has eyes only for his meister. When the younger boy reaches up to thread his fingers through the long strands of Spirit's hair, the weapon stops breathing. When he pulls Spirit's head down towards his, Spirit sucks in air so hard he almost chokes.

Stein doesn't kiss like anyone Spirit has ever kissed before. The meister comes just barely close enough for their lips to touch, so the counterpoint rhythm of their breathing pulls them out of contact and then pushes them back together. Spirit's never been more aware of the ebb and flow of air in his lungs or in Stein's. When the meister carefully moves his mouth, Spirit holds utterly still and lets the shift of those chapped lips drag over his with spine-tingling sensitivity. Just before the younger boy steps back, he runs the very edge of his tongue against the part of Spirit's mouth. The weapon is still shivering when the meister pulls away, and Stein's fingers stay in Spirit's hair, idly toying with the strands like he has forgotten Spirit is someone else.

The smile on Stein's face is lopsided and shy, but his eyes are glowing now like Spirit's never seen them do before, and there is an openness in his face that sparks through Spirit's blood like fire.

"Fair's fair," he says, and then Spirit is smiling too.


	37. Unwell

**Unwell by Matchbox 20**

Stein likes to lie on his back when he smokes. He can watch the smoke curl up towards the ceiling, catching the light to form shapes, faces half-seen and smiles that turn into frowns before evaporating back into low-hanging fog. Sometimes he imagines they are friends, that they speak with the voices in his head, some friendly, some not, all familiar.

He clings to what he knows is himself. Self-contained conversations are not a good sign in and of themselves, but they are a usual oddity, not like the hallucinations that are bleeding into his reality and the cramping, half-controlled movements that sometimes seize his limbs. He is losing himself, losing the fragile truce he made with sanity years ago, and there is nothing he can do to stop it. The Kishin's madness is spreading over the world, and the proverbial canary of his sanity is barely fluttering against the bars of his mind.

It is useless to fight it. Instead he considers the future, distantly, freed from the emotions that responsibility or desperation might bring because he /knows/ it is inevitable. Will he hurt someone? Will he hurt himself? Will anyone know what has happened at all, or will they not recognize the change he can feel climbing up his spine and in his blood?

Stein doesn't know if he'll ever come back to the slightly-broken, mostly-functional self that he inhabits for the ever-diminishing present. He hopes so, but hope has no bearing or effect on reality. He considers telling someone, warning them, but the only person he would want to tell is Spirit, and he knows (he /knows/) that Spirit will never accept the inevitability of this like he has. Better that he keep it to himself, that Spirit get irritated and angry and distant with him than that he condemn Spirit to the painful knowledge of his impending decline while denying him the ability to /change/ anything.

It will become perfectly clear soon enough. Stein thinks about that, sometimes, while he exhales clouds into the air above him and watches them shift into ever-worsening images. Soon - in a month, a week, a day - he will lose himself and his memories to the Kishin's Madness. Then there will be only Spirit, and Spirit's memories, to indicate that there was ever such a meister as Franken Stein, that he ever cared or loved or existed.

It should be a depressing thought. It is not. It makes Stein smile, in the quiet darkness of his room where no one else can see. Existing in Spirit's memories, in the gold-washed beauty of the weapon's mind that Stein has glimpsed when they Resonate, is a far better end than any other he can imagine.


	38. Who Knew

**Who Knew by P!nk**

Spirit didn't believe that Stein was gone for a long time. At first it was just an assumption, turning at the sound of footsteps or the glimpse of movement with a question on his lips for the meister before he remembered. For a long time, there was just the confusion buffering him from the actual realization that the younger boy was well and truly gone.

After that, there was an even longer period when his rational brain knew and understood but his subconscious didn't. That was worse than the first. Spirit would see white hair across a room or down a hall and jerk towards it, hope filling his veins in the blind moment before memory set in and logic told him it couldn't be. He had to fight with himself, talk his reflex down with logic until he half-believed it *wasn't* Stein, but every time he had to bolt after the shine of glasses or the glow of pale hair until he found out who it was, until he convinced himself that he wasn't walking away from a possible miracle.

The first day he didn't follow, didn't have to see the actual cause to know it *wasn't*, was the first night he dreamt of the meister.

It was such a relief to see him again. Spirit was laughing and crying and Stein was raising an eyebrow in mild amusement and Spirit was talking over himself, trying to explain this awful sense of loss that he couldn't even remember, and reaching out to touch Stein's hand and arm and face, and then something was pulling him back and he shoved it away because *this* was real, this couldn't be the dream, Stein would *never* leave him. Then the color bled out of the hallucination and the sound of his alarm crept in instead, and Spirit was opening his eyes to the darkness of his empty room instead.

He threw the alarm across the room in the first rush of furious loss. When the second wave of recollection hit, he curled up into the minimal comfort of the bed and cried until his throat was raw and his face was rough with dried salt. Eventually even he ran out of tears.

After that the dreams came more frequently, at least once a week and often several times, until they became a regular part of Spirit's night. He stopped using an alarm at all for a while in an attempt to extend them, but when he woke up on his own he couldn't hold on to the trailing edges of the fading memory and that was no good either, so he resigned himself to interruption. His subconscious self became better at taking action too, as the loss itself became ingrained in Spirit's awareness. He stopped talking during the dream, stopped letting Stein leave for even a moment, started clinging to every word and every smile and every breath his self-created delusion offered so he could recall them in the morning.

It wouldn't be so bad if Stein's departure hadn't been so unexpected. Spirit had known things weren't going well, of course, but he had expected that his meister would be there with him indefinitely, rough patches or no. The assumption was so entrenched in his mind that the idea that it might be wrong was laughable, absurd. When they were very young, just a year or two into their time at the Academy, a classmate had asked Spirit what he was going to do after his training was complete and his meister went on to train another death weapon. With the clarity of hindsight Spirit recalls staring at her blankly, laughing with real amusement when he realized she was serious, telling her in perfect sincerity, "We'll never not be partners. Stein won't ever leave me."

He's not sure if he wants to shake the youthful certainty out of his past self or take it back for himself, cling to the unshakeable faith that has now been splintered by the force of reality, by the fact of waking up to an empty house and a cold bed and an unfathomable loss.

Even his good memories betray him with time. He drags up the look on Stein's face behind his shining glasses, the feel of Stein's mouth on his, the warmth of Stein's skin under his fingers, so many times that the recollections start to wear thin with too much review. Eventually Spirit is recalling the last five times he made himself remember instead of the event itself and the pleasure in the image and the remembered touch is all but gone. He still pulls them up, though; the images and his dreams are the only thing he has left to remind him that Stein existed, that Stein was his, that Stein will come back to him. He has to believe that the meister will come back someday. The alternative is too awful to consider.


	39. Something More

**Something More by Secondhand Serenade**

Stein doesn't recognize himself in the mirror anymore.

Sometime in the last decade he started putting on a personality with his glasses, a smile and warmth and an assumed friendliness that he could turn on and off at will. It was more comfortable than trying to work with people constantly on edge around him, easier to pick up a tone of cheerful eccentricity that slotted better into the general worldview than the messy, broken truth. But now it is still there when he takes his glasses off, when he gets close enough to the mirror to see his skin clearly in spite of his nearsightedness, like the mask has melted into him and he can't separate it from himself anymore.

He doesn't know who he is. He can't remember what he was or who he used to be, and he knows that this persona is just a shell but it feels as if he has gone hollow, like there's nothing underneath anymore at all. He can't remember what his goal is, can't make himself /care/ about anything at all, can't always get to his feet when he collapses to the ground. The walls can take the weight that his empty muscles can't and facing out into the darkened room is better than looking into his reflection. All that he has to do is breathe, force his lungs through inhalation after inhalation and calm the frantic pace of his heart.

Part of his brain is still optimistic. That part shouts that this is just the Kishin's madness, that this is a borrowed insanity that is sapping the meaning from everything in the world and the light from the sun and the pleasure from existence. That part says that things will get better, that the world is worth protecting, that there are things worth living for and reasons to keep breathing.

That part is fading every day.

Stein keeps going, even though things are getting worse with every hour and with every forced breath. He is driven forward by the inertia of a long-forgotten cause, shoved down a slope by the influence of some sort of affection and some sort of caring that he used to understand. He can't put the pieces together, can't remember what it felt like or even who it was for, but he remembers the importance, remembers the drive like the lingering panic of a fast-fading dream, and so he keeps going as long as he can, keeps breathing and keeps moving and keeps getting to his feet as often as possible, because he knows there is /something/ worth surviving for, something worth saving, even if he no longer has a name to put to the lingering impression of red hair.


	40. Ships in the Night

**Ships in the Night by Mat Kearney**

Stein has lost count of the number of times Spirit has missed the point. When they were in the Academy together, he would catalog the moments in his head, the times when another second would have broken through Spirit's awareness, when one glance would have let Spirit read Stein's heart in his eyes, when one word would have been enough for Stein to spell it out so clearly even his perpetually oblivious partner couldn't mistake him. After Spirit married Kami, the list became too long for Stein to remember and the whole situation became more amusing than frustrating.

It was during the long years of not-speaking and not-seeing that Stein made his decision. Now he's always there, in-sight and in-mind for Spirit, quietly *present* as much as possible, because eventually things *have* to work out. It made things easier too. Stein doesn't *do* anything, exactly, just exists, as close as Spirit will let him, as involved as he can be in whatever Spirit is doing and thinking about and interested in this week. He is there when Spirit is drunk and crying about Kami, he is there when the weapon is in commanding Death-Scythe-mode, he is there when Spirit is cheerful and sad and paternal and childish and brilliant and foolish, and the more time he spends around the weapon the more his affection builds on itself, until even Spirit's worst crying jags and most illogical rants just make him smile.

They are separated sometimes, of course. Stein hasn't told Spirit his goal of being constantly present, and without the weapon's conscious compliance there are necessarily times when he goes places where Stein can't follow. And then there are times when Stein's own head pulls him away, when the Madness sings too loudly and he loses control of his body and his reason and comes back to himself miles away from Spirit, mentally or physically or both.

That's okay. It doesn't really matter, not anymore, not since Stein promised himself and more importantly silently promised Spirit that he would be there. He will come back from wherever he goes and from wherever his internal conflict takes him, however long it takes him to return to Spirit's side. If all the sanity of the world evaporated, if the world itself crumbled in on itself, Stein would find a way to be with Spirit at the end of it.

Until then, he waits. Eventually Spirit will see. Eventually he will realize. Stein has every intention of being there when the awareness hits the weapon, so that when Spirit leans in towards him Stein can cross half the distance himself and they will finally, finally, stop missing each other.


	41. Suppose

**Suppose by Secondhand Serenade**

Stein can't hear what Spirit is saying.

The weapon is saying something, but the particular order of the particular words is far less important than the tone, the almost-sob in the back of his throat that says he's really angry this time, angrier than Stein has ever heard him before, and last time Stein thought it would be too much and this time he is sure it will be.

The meister has trouble keeping to the present when Spirit is angry with him. It might be a defense mechanism or it might just be another quirk of his broken brain, but his thoughts retreat from the pain in Spirit's eyes and the high scratch of hurt in his voice and backtrack, as if he might be able to find a way to avert this, as if there were a way for him to change the past if he could just find the point where everything went wrong.

Stein wonders if there is anything he can say, now, to fix this. He has tipped his head at a careful angle so the light from above catches the lenses of his glasses so Spirit can't see the desire and the apology in his eyes, and the rest of his face is carefully blank. It is just his eyes that he has never been able to master, and he has never been more grateful to the protective cure for his nearsightedness than he is at moments like this, when Spirit can tear at him with words that Stein doesn't hear while the meister tries to pinpoint the turn in their history when he could have fixed this.

It would have been better for Spirit if Stein had never met him. It would have avoided this hurt, this current pain, if they were never partners, if Stein had never held Spirit's weapon-form in his hands, had never felt the perfect compatibility with the other boy, had never Resonated with the weapon, had never merged their lives into a single thread instead of two. It would have been better if Stein had said something, weeks or months or years ago, some apology or some promise to change, shown something to indicate the constant fact of his guilt about the burden he is to Spirit and the things that he does to the weapon when the bonds of his sanity melt away. It would be better if Stein could convince himself to do *anything* *right now*, to cut Spirit off with a kiss or a word or a touch or a confession, to spill out his heart in language the weapon can understand instead of locking it behind an assumed mask and white-glass reflection, to tell Spirit to slow down, to talk more slowly and to breathe more deeply so Stein can actually *hear* what he is saying instead of getting locked in the emotional barrage of the weapon's overflowing hurt. It would be better if everything were different, if Stein could fall asleep to the lullaby of Spirit's breath instead of lying awake thinking of it, if Spirit smiled at him instead of crying about him, if Spirit touched him instead of pulling back.

There is nothing left in Stein to change. He cannot change the past, however much he may want to, and he cannot muster the strength to move or speak or put words to the need that locks his throat and his head into frozen panic, and all he can do is watch Spirit pull them apart because of a lack of response from him.

"That's *it*," Spirit is saying, and the defeated slope of his shoulders catches Stein's attention as his words so far have failed to do, and Stein is listening now that it is too late. "I can't keep this up on my own." The older boy rubs the back of his palm against his damp cheeks, unconsciously tracing the pattern that Stein's fingers itch to outline against his skin. His sob masquerades as a laugh in the back of his mouth. "It's not like you care anyway."

He is turning to go, and his back and his expression and the pace of his steps are all screaming danger, and for a moment of clarity Stein sees this as he will see it in the future, looking back and knowing that *this*, *this* was the moment to do something, *this* was the moment to change, and forever hating himself for not doing *something*. It is the first time he has had the foresight to imagine the present as the past, and the first time he has ever said anything.

"Senpai."

The weapon stops dead, as frozen as if Stein had shouted instead of half-whispered his name. There is a long pause before he turns back, hesitating as if he doubts his own ears.

When Spirit is facing him again, Stein brings his chin and his gaze down. He can't quite force himself to look at Spirit as he speaks.

"Please don't go. I want to stay with you, I want to make this work. Just - stay."

When he manages to meet Spirit's gaze, whatever the weapon sees collapses the hurt on his face into shock, all Spirit's words coalesce into one startled, "Stein," and the meister has the sublime sense of entering a future that, for once, he hasn't foreseen.


	42. Fall for You

**Fall for You by Secondhand Serenade**

"Just - stay."

It is not the words that pull Spirit back, but the expression in Stein's eyes. Spirit has never seen the meister look like that, like he is afraid and hopeful and in pain all at the same time. Spirit has never seen Stein look like much of anything, other than stoic and amused and distant. Spirit didn't know Stein *could* look as human, as *young*, as he does at this moment. The quiet is ringing, the absence of anger in Spirit's head so novel that he is able to hear his own breath and feel his heartbeat against his chest and throat.

"Stein," his mouth says, and he doesn't recognize his own voice like this, with all the emotional baggage of recent months gone. Stein doesn't react, just looks up at him with far more in his eyes than Spirit knew was in the meister at all, and the stiffness in his shoulders is starting to look like fear and panic rather than repressed anger, and Spirit steps in towards him, only barely aware of his own movements.

He stops within arm's reach, standing over the younger boy, and Stein is looking up at him like he is the sun and Spirit is still breathing, carefully and slowly because every lungful of air is demanding conscious focus, but he's not sure that Stein is. He has to look away from those eyes, there is too much there to take in, and his focus slides sideways onto Stein's hair, along the line of his face. It is like looking at a painting, really *observing* the meister without the harsh filter of frustration overlaid across the top, and the past is climbing into Spirit's throat, reminding him how long it took before he was accustomed to the sharp-edged beauty of Stein's face, noticing the silk-fine drift of the other boy's silver hair, the way it lifts at the ends as if it has only the faintest relationship with gravity. Spirit reaches out to touch it before he can stop himself, and for a moment he is afraid that Stein will flinch away, but the other boy is utterly still, even when Spirit's fingers trail through the drifting softness of his hair.

Spirit promised himself he would never stop seeing this. He remembers the constant appreciation of his meister for the first few weeks they were partners, the reckless vow he made to himself to always really *look* at Stein no matter what new madness the meister had discovered. He doesn't know when he stopped, when the raw human beauty of the meister become ordinary and mundane, and it hurts to realize how utterly mistaken he was, how much he has been accepting without thought like he accepts breathing, and it hurts to see Stein still looking at him as if he is something precious and perfect when Spirit can feel his flaws writ large across his consciousness.

He wants to drop to his knees, to let his weight crush him into the floor as he apologizes until he can bear to look at Stein again. He doesn't. He makes himself slowly come down, evening the difference in their heights until Spirit kneeling is eye-level with Stein sitting. He frees his hand from the meister's hair, braces himself against the edge of the furniture so he can carefully lean in until his own peripheral vision loses the focus in Stein's green eyes and his lips brush against Stein's, just barely.

It is barely a kiss at all, barely a touch, but this close Spirit can confirm that Stein's not breathing, that he is holding his breath like Spirit is made of the finest glass and a word will shatter him, so he says, "Stein. Breathe," softer than usual because Stein can feel his mouth move more than he can hear or see him, and Stein sucks in a breath that is only barely a shudder, and Spirit can feel the pull of Stein's inhale against his skin and the intimacy of sharing air makes him lightheaded.

"Senpai -" Stein starts, syllables coming slow from his mouth, and Spirit says "Ssh," and kisses him so the sound is lost in their mouths, and that's all he needs to say at all.


End file.
